Tesla's autopilot settlement.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Jammale. It's Friday and that means we're back with another episode of Marketplace Tech Bites week in Review. This week the Labor Department

confirmed what a lot of Americans have been feeling. Inflation is kind of

of sticking around and higher interest rates are likely to as well.

We'll look at what that means for venture capital, which was already

slow to flow.

Plus, the Biden administration announced a 6.6 billion dollar deal with Taiwan-based semiconductor maker

T-S-M-C to build a third production hub in Arizona. We check in on the ongoing rollout

of the Chips Act which is making this all possible.

But first, Tesla has settled a lawsuit in the death of a software engineer killed while driving

a model X using the company's semi-autonomous driving software,

autopilot.

The suit placed scrutiny on Elon Musk's claims about the software.

Jewel Burke Solomon, managing partner at Collab Capital, explained why the company settled.

The timing of when they settled is very interesting because it was just before jury selection

because this was going to trial.

And so I think that they understand probably

that there are some difficulties in how the tech is built.

Right now, the autopilot feature is really dependent on clear lines on

roads and we know that that's not the case on all roads that that Tesla's

drivers are on and even where this accident happened there was a

...