Video Transcription
I want to talk to you today a little bit about self-driving cars and an incident that recently happened with an Uber driver. The Uber driver was operating a self driving car, and he was streaming something on his computer. The vehicle got involved in the collision with the other vehicle, and it killed the other person. So, the prosecutor in the state was trying to determine whether or not Uber itself could be criminally charged with causing the death. The prosecutor finally came down on the side that, no ,Uber could not be criminally charged. Now, what happened was as this individual, the Uber driver, the Uber supposed driver, was transporting his client, and it ran into the other vehicle and killed the other person. The Uber driver was streaming on his computer, and just before the accident happened, the technology of the Uber vehicle identified the other vehicle as first a pedestrian, then a person, and finally some strange object.
But the triggering point here was that the car itself was supposed to automatically brake, and guess what? It failed to brake. The family ended up filing a lawsuit against Uber for their negligent design use of that vehicle. They’re a supplier of the vehicle. Of course the manufacturer got sued, and then the driver himself got sued. Now, the driver himself not only got sued, but the driver himself, even though Uber, the corporation, could not be sued or prosecuted criminally, the Uber driver was prosecuted criminally. So, these are very serious things. There’s a lot of questions nowadays as to when these vehicles are actually going to be safe for everyone to use on the road. We’re not quite there yet, and so you have to be very careful when you get into one of these vehicles, because the duty of the Uber driver, had he been paying attention, was to go ahead and manually activate the brake system. If you’ve been injured by one of the self-driving vehicles involving an Uber, please call my office at (770) 792-1000.
