That covers the civil side of things, but GPs point about criminal charges still applies. Yeah, they might have signed an NDA but I don't think those can restrict what can be uncovered during discovery (but I could be wrong -- IANAL).
Sure, but I'm sure some prosecutor took a look at it and decided it wasn't worthwhile. People get killed in accidents all the time, and frequently nobody gets charged with anything. A person being killed in a car accident while jaywalking at night because the driver wasn't paying attention particularly well is a story as old as cars, and usually doesn't result in jail time. Turns out, people are legally allowed to drive while being really shitty drivers, and you mostly can't prosecute people criminally just for being bad at driving. If anyone was going to face criminal charges it would be the driver, and I suppose the relevant prosecutor didn't like the odds.
"some prosecutor took a look at it and decided it wasn't worthwhile"
Probably a prosecutor that works for some local government that could be also be liable for letting Uber operate that car in their jurisdiction. I imagine that discussion happened.
"The state and city of Tempe were hit with a lawsuit Monday over their alleged negligence in the fatal crash between a self-driving Uber and a pedestrian a year ago."
> Turns out, people are legally allowed to drive while being really shitty drivers
The UK actually has a law against this, see "Causing Death by Careless or Inconsiderate Driving (Section 2B of the Road Traffic Act 1988, amended by the Road Safety Act 2006, s. 20)" here: http://www.brake.org.uk/news/15-facts-a-resources/facts/497-...
It means you can be prosecuted for causing a death in a moment of inattention. It's a bad law from both sides: As you can see from the link above it doesn't satisfy the charity (who want stronger penalties), while at the same time being a catch-all law which could catch anyone out who drives, even if they are generally very cautious drivers.
By the way I should add there was already a separate law for causing death by dangerous driving.
One more reason why we need self-driving cars I suppose.
It’s illegal to run people over by accident in the US too (if it was feasibly avoidable). The parent’s point was that prosecutors usually exercise their discretion not to charge them.
Absolutely. However humans are simply not built to be incredibly careful for minutes on end, day after day. One hopes self-driving cars will never let their guard down.
Prosecutors, even high profile/positioned ones, have a finite amount of resources. At the end of the day it might be romantic to go after a megacorp but a prosecutor's job is to persue justice against criminals, you might get a few high profile executive types and justice for one family (if you're the type to consider beyond the defendant) but with those same resources and time you could probably lock up at least twenty violent, in the real way, deadbeats. I'm not saying that's the way it should be, but I think it's worth acknowledging because it's why the problem is hard to solve. Everyone wants to see big fish getting hard time, but reality looks more like Harvey Dent's speech to Commissioner Gordon and that's for the good prosecutors.
But moreover, it's totally unreasonable that anyone would have gone to jail as a result of this, except again, maybe the driver. The driver was literally being paid to monitor the vehicle. How is an argument that high profile executive types were engaging in criminal negligence going to fly, when the bar for legal driving is already that 1 person is in the car nominally paying attention?
Because the driver was given an impossible task in order to save money for the company. They were required to both fill in information on a tablet and monitor the car. It's not even clear that monitoring a semi-self driving car is even possible. Constant vigilance for the 2% of edge cases where it might crash is harder than just driving. Uber had previously used two people to do this task but had switched to one person.
Executives must be prosecuted when their money saving results in deaths or else there is no incentive for them not to make this trade off.
Not taking sides here but want to point out one thing:
When I took the Uber self driving cab in Pittsburgh (randomly called on my Uber), there were two people in the car.
One person was a driver, and the other person was in the passenger seat with a laptop. They were both very polite. The person with the laptop was very focused and watched the sensors take in information.
The driver -- at least in my case -- was very cautious and almost never let the car do anything by itself. He was almost driving it the whole time.
This is right after Uber brought over the team from Carnegie Mellon (so 2015 ish?).
Yeah, but out of all the self-driving test miles Uber is doing, how many are in the self-driving cabs vs non-public road testing?
I would expect them to be very careful with a passenger in the car scrutinizing but much less so in a test car. If a high enough percentage of the millions of miles these companies are doing are tests without passengers, there could be a lot of road miles happening with a single overburdened driver that the public isn't seeing much of.
There are a bunch of incentives for them to get this right. Moreover there might be a reasonable argument that they are having a net positive impact even if their car was slightly less safe than most drivers - they are going to save people probably single digit % points of their life staring at a road.
If you think their car isn't safe; don't buy one and don't be driven in one. It isn't reasonable to say they can't have the occasional accident though.
