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.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/tempe/2019/03/19/...
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.
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.
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?).
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.
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.
But they weren't killed in a car accident, she was killed in a robot accident.
The car didn't accelerate or steer into the victim.
That's what's called a settlement, a.k.a. hush money.
Very, very different from criminal charges.
As noted below Uber settled (that typically means their insurer settled) so there is no need for a civil lawsuit. That is efficiency of the system and how the system is supposed to work. In other words you only bring a suit against the insured if the insurer wrongfully denies your claim, here the insurer paid up, so there is no need for a civil suit by the estate of the deceased against Uber.
The criminal side of things is interesting...but for sake of argument lets say you were in an accident, further assume it was your fault, resulting in a fatality. Typically, unless there was a separate crime (e.g. DUI, drag racing, etc...) there will be no criminal charge, just a civil traffic ticket for the accident (in many jurisdictions there will be a specific charge/penalties for an accident resulting in a fatality, but that will still be a traffic ticket, meaning non-criminal).
I am curious if the "driver" received a traffic ticket for the accident, my guess is he did, I can't imagine the responding officer(s) not issuing a traffic ticket for an accident much less one resulting in a fatality. Interestingly these traffic tickets for accidents with fatalities do usually carry a potential penalties that include suspension of the drivers license, so I do think the law will need to catch up with reality in that regard because suspending the driver's DL doesn't seem to punish the right party in the case of a self-driving car, so perhaps these states that allow self-driving cars need to think about adopting traffic laws specific to self-driving cars and figure out who those tickets should go to and the proper punishment (obviously you can't suspend the DL of a self-driving car or a car company).
Why not? They have to have some kind of license to operate, right? Even if it's not labelled "driver's license". If their vehicles are going around running people over, revoke whatever license it is that they have until they get it fixed.
>so perhaps these states that allow self-driving cars need to think about adopting traffic laws specific to self-driving cars and figure out who those tickets should go to and the proper punishment
Why not? This (suspending permission to operate on public roads) seems like a perfectly reasonable response to a self-driving car company being negligent.
>so perhaps these states that allow self-driving cars need to think about adopting traffic laws specific to self-driving cars and figure out who those tickets should go to and the proper punishment
Police can't just make up traffic violations that don't currently exist and Courts can't begin dishing out punishments that don't exist for violations that don't exist.
I think the deceased and their family would disagree.
Sure there are existing regulations, but the idea is that as this new technology evolves and is being tested in the field we will find failures and create new regulations to govern.
Consider when the horseless carriage began replacing horse and buggy, traffic laws evolved over time as we realized we needed lanes, traffic signals, speed limits, etc...
Those laws continue to evolve to this day (ex.: red light cameras, ride-for-hire, etc...), to suggest new laws are not required for driver less vehicles and the current laws are sufficient, especially where we have driver-less vehicle death, suggests a serious disconnect with how law works.
The pedestrian ultimately got hit because a lot of fallback systems failed: They disabled the software's ability to emergency-break (1), they disabled the cars' systems to emergency break, and the operator of the vehicle was distracted, not reacting in time.
(1) This was actually done due to false-positives, i.e. the car slamming on the breaks in non-emergency cases. (I find that's a relevant point, because without that detail it just sounds more ludicrous than it already is).
And the emergency breaking relied on the human operator but the system was not designed to warn the operator.