Bryant Walker Smith, a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law who studies autonomous vehicles, expressed concern about the signal it sends to prosecute only the driver.
“It will come across to many that that’s where all the fault is, and the companies behind these don’t have responsibility,” Smith said. “Uber’s testing program created circumstances where this was foreseeable and almost inevitable. Someone spends their whole day seeing a vehicle drive well and starts assuming that it will drive well.”