Last week, the National Transportation Safety Board released dozens of new documents that provide a detailed understanding of the circumstances of Huang's death. The documents confirm a claim by Walter Huang's family that he had experienced this particular glitch, in this particular spot, multiple times prior to the crash. He complained to family and friends about the issue. However, the NTSB was not able to confirm another key claim: that Huang had reported the issue to Tesla. Forensic data also suggests one reason Huang might not have been paying attention to the road in the final seconds before his death: he was in the habit of playing a game called Three Kingdoms in his car while driving to work. Logs from his Apple-provided iPhone showed that he used the app during his morning commute every day the week of his fatal Friday crash. However, those logs don't provide enough information to show whether he was interacting with the game in the final seconds before his death.
The documents also point to a third possible factor in Huang's death: the government officials who designed and maintained Highway 101. This exact turnoff had been the scene of multiple crashes in the years before Huang's death—including a fatal one in 2015. One reason the 2015 crash had been fatal was that officials had been too slow to replace a crash attenuator—an accordion-like metal device designed to cushion a car's impact. Unfortunately, Huang's crash happened just two weeks after another crash in the same spot, and once again the crash attenuator hadn't been replaced. This reduced Huang's chances of surviving the crash.
