Shares of Tesla dipped following the news and were nearly 2% lower when US markets closed. Following the verdict, plaintiffs attorneys said Mr Musk had misrepresented the capabilities of the company's Autopilot driver assistance software. "Tesla designed Autopilot only for controlled-access highways yet deliberately chose not to restrict drivers from using it elsewhere, alongside Elon Musk telling the world Autopilot drove better than humans," said attorney Brett Schreiber in a statement to the BBC. Mr Schreiber said Tesla and Mr Musk had long propped up the company's valuation with "self-driving hype at the expense of human lives." "Tesla's lies turned our roads into test tracks for their fundamentally flawed technology," he added.

Tesla reached a settlement on the eve of its highest-profile trial yet over a crash blamed on Autopilot, the driver-assistance system Elon Musk has billed as crucial to his pursuit of self-driving cars, according to court filings. Terms of the settlement weren't disclosed in filings made public Monday in state court in San Jose, California. The trial that was set to kick off this week centered on Walter Huang, a 38-year-old Apple engineer who was killed on the way to work in 2018 when his Model X veered off the highway and slammed into a roadside barrier at about 71 miles (114 kilometers) per hour. A federal safety agency's investigation of the accident found that Huang was probably distracted with a video game app on his phone, while also pointing to "limitations" of the Autopilot system.

Tesla has settled a lawsuit over a car crash which killed an Apple engineer in 2018 after his car veered off a highway near San Francisco, court documents showed on Monday. The settlement was made as the trial was about to start over the high-profile accident involving Tesla's driver assistant technology, ending a five-year legal battle over the case. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed. The case involves a highway accident that killed Walter Huang. Tesla had contended Huang misused the system because he was playing a video game just before the accident.

This week, we learned the future of the car is not owning one--at least not if Uber gets its way. The ride-hailing giant came out with twin announcements: On Monday, it said it would acquire the bike-share company Jump, in a deal worth $200 million. On Wednesday, it announced a move into car-sharing and public transit ticketing, too, inking deals with the startup Getaround and the British mobile payments company Masabi. The goal: Making it much, much easier to live car-free, and maybe take a few UberX rides along the way. Meanwhile, Airstream rolled out an adorable and very practical new trailer that is, perhaps, too small to share with too many honies, and the Silicon Valley–based lidar startup Luminar shared its newest tech with transportation editor Alex Davies.

Following the investigation of a fatal Tesla Model S crash, the NTSB concluded in a 500-page report that the driver, Joshua Brown, ignored repeated "Autopilot" warnings to keep his hands on the wheel. "For the vast majority of the trip, the Autopilot hands-on state remained at'hands required, not detected,' " the report states. Specifically, Brown was supposed to have his hands on the wheel for a 37-minute portion of the trip, and did so for just 25 seconds. At the same time, the NTSB appears to have debunked reports from the truck driver involved in the accident that Brown was watching a Harry Potter movie at the time of the crash. "No Harry Potter movie file was found on the hard drive of the [Chromebook] device," it states.

The US auto safety regulator has cleared Tesla's Model S of defects that could have led to the death of a man who collided with a truck while using the car's Autopilot system. The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found no cause to order a recall of the vehicles, which have advanced driver aids capable of maintaining speed and distance to other cars on the road, lane position and overtaking. It placed responsibility for the accident primarily on the driver, former Navy Seal Joshua Brown. A Tesla spokesperson said: "The safety of our customers comes first, and we appreciate the thoroughness of NHTSA's report and its conclusion." Tesla chief executive Elon Musk took to Twitter to praise NHTSA's decision, highlighting the positives of its report.

Last May a Tesla Model S ran into a tractor trailer in Florida while in Autopilot mode. The collision resulted in the death of the driver Joshua Brown and prompted an investigation by the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration). Today that government agency concluded its investigation and found no defects with the vehicle's Autopilot or Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) features. The NHTSA noted the systems "are not designed to reliably perform in all crash modes, including crossing path collisions. The Autopilot system is an Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) that requires the continual and full attention of the driver to monitor the traffic environment and be prepared to take action to avoid crashes."

The death of a person earlier this year while driving with Autopilot in a Tesla sedan, along with news of more crashes involving Teslas operating in Autopilot, has triggered a torrent of concerns about the safety of self-driving cars. But there is a way to improve safety across a rapidly evolving range of advanced mobility technologies and vehicles – from semi-autonomous driver assist features like Tesla's Autopilot to a fully autonomous self-driving car like Google's. The answer is connectivity: wireless communication that connects vehicles to each other, to the surrounding infrastructure, even to bicyclists and pedestrians. Joshua Brown (pictured before the crash) died earlier this year while driving with Autopilot in a Tesla sedan. With news of more crashes involving Teslas in Autopilot, people worry about the safety of self-driving cars.