This goes way beyond Uber. The auto manufacturer and the developer of the self-driving technology might have a lot more exposure than Uber.
Arizona law states the pedestrian must yield to vehicles in the road when the pedestrian is crossing outside a marked crosswalk. Unless something extenuating happened (i.e. the vehicle was speeding in autonomous mode, or there was enough reaction time to stop, with no measures taken to do so either by the computer or human safety driver), then I'd say the dead jaywalker's estate has no recourse.
The car was most certainly set up with video to record everything going on, so I would prefer to see what the video shows first.
personal injury lawyers-it are going to have a field day with self-driving cars, as well it should, given the extreme likelihood of continuous death and mayhem from this not-yet-ready-for-prime-time technology.
the great thing about this from a liability lawyer’s standpoint is that almost all accidents nowadays are caused by the drivers and NOT by faulty or unsafe auto design or manufacturing. Therefore, today’s main liability targets have been the bad drivers and their insurance companies, IF THEY ARE INSURED.
With driverless cars, there’s no possibility that the drivers can be at fault since there aren’t any, and therefore there’s a 100% chance that the manufacturers are at fault, and the manufacturers have DEEP pockets, unlike individual drivers, even the ones WITH insurance.
Quite quickly, driverless car makers will be sued out of existence unless states absolve them of their liability, at which point it becomes open season on the innocents by driverless car manufactures. In point of fact, the liability waiver would actually have to occur at the Federal level because of cars sold in a state that has liability waivers driving across the border to another state that has no liability waivers.