Attorney Bryant Greening lays out his concerns over Robotaxi safety and lack of regulations.
HOST
Ladies and gentlemen, drivers, gig workers, and everyone in between, welcome to This Week in Rideshare podcast. I’m your host Jared Hoffa. It is Friday, October 3, and this week, robo taxis are here, but are they ready? Attorney Brian Greening expresses his concerns. And as always, Legal Rideshare breaks it down.
And from Legal Rideshare, I’m joined by the cofounder and lead attorney, Bryant Greening. Bryant! Happy Friday.
BRYANT GREENING
Happy Friday, Jared. Great to be here. It is.
HOST
And this is a special edition. We talk about robotaxis a lot. A lot of times, we’re discussing the articles that we see in segments. But this time, it’s all eyes on you, Bryant. You have recently just written a very interesting article about robotaxis and if the cities are ready?
And thought of this opportunity to really, just kind of dive into the whole pros and cons and risks of robotaxis from a legal perspective, not just from a fad or trend perspective. So, I appreciate you doing this.
BRYANT GREENING
Yeah. I’m excited.
As I’ve said before in these episodes where all eyes are on me, I don’t love it. But I’m happy to to have the spotlight here and talk about something that’s really important, something that’s changing in our environment. And, you know, it’s we wanna get ahead of this before it’s too late. There’s a lot of different things for us to think about, which I laid out in in the article that I wrote, and I’m excited to get into the trenches right now and and talk about the things that are important to me and things that are on my mind and hopefully, generate some conversation and some policy talk while we’re at it.
HOST
Which is absolutely perfect. I’m gonna cover some of the important areas that you that you covered here. And, again, this article is actually on our Medium blog if you go there, and it will be on legalrideshare.com, on our blog there if you wanna read the full article. But, let’s let’s begin here.
One of the first things that you say, and it is obviously is pretty clear, but it’s important. And I wanted to dive more into this. But you said, quote, we cannot afford to make the same mistakes with robotaxis. You said that autonomous vehicles are being tested and deployed, and other giants are racing to dominate the market, and their lobbying dollars, which sounds familiar, are flowing just as quickly. But while these companies promise convenience and innovation, they rarely talk about who bears the cost when something goes wrong.
And make no mistake, things will go wrong. I would love for you to talk a little bit more about, what you’re implying there and why this is a bigger issue than people are realizing.
BRYANT GREENING
Yeah. So I think in this particular point, it’s important for us to look back at what happened with Uber and Lyft. So, Uber and Lyft come to town, and they have no regulation.
The cities basically just roll out the red carpet for them, and in a lot of ways, it was good. So they changed transportation in terms of having easy access to getting a ride directly from where you were to in, you know, you the car shows up and you you drive to your location. And for a lot of people, even in big cities, taxis were not providing that kind of a to b transportation. So there were a lot of benefits that came from the convenience of Uber and Lyft.
But at the same time, when the cities didn’t prepare for their arrival, didn’t set regulation out, things such as insurance minimums, such as, what happens when there’s a whole new sect of workers where there are changing policies for employment, such as, what’s gonna happen when the companies are strong arming other industries like taxis and perhaps using illegal measures, to wipe out other industries.
Like there’s all these different components of rideshare that were completely overlooked from the get go. And the cities really paid the price. The cities were left back on their heels and having to respond to everything that these new companies did, from a defensive position. And that gave a ton of power to the tech companies. It gave it gave a ton of power to these, multi billion dollar industries who could really throw their weight around without the cities being able to take any meaningful action.
And what I’m saying here is that we have an opportunity with robotaxis to get ahead of that situation, to set regulation, to set standards, to tell the companies how we will allow them onto our streets rather than the other way around.
HOST
Yeah. And there is something very different this time. I mean, look, you’ve been part of this since the absolute beginning and have seen this, and I think that’s why you’re a great person to talk about it. And one of the things that is very different from robotaxis and the disruption of Uber and Lyft and rideshare is often they would symbolically point a gun at the government and say, look: If you regulate us, you’re costing jobs. People wanna work. This is a way for them to make money if they’ve lost a job or they’re still in school. Robotaxis are different. It is not giving people jobs.
It is taking jobs away this time. And, again, I I wholeheartedly agree with you that we can get ahead of it this time and make sure that we know you know, fool me once as I said before, you know, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. I’m also proud that I can do that because George W Bush couldn’t even do that phrase. I’m very proud I can do that. I it’s fun of a tongue twister.
BRYANT GREENING
You know, I made fun of W at the time, but anytime I say it, I do stumble. I know. Every time I do that, I always think of that. But it is true, and this is really an opportunity, like you said, for that. And I do think they aren’t gonna have as much wiggle room as they used to.
HOST
Yeah. It’s the reverse. It’s actually taking jobs. So, there are some things that are different this time around.
BRYANT GREENING
Before we change topics, I just think that one of the reasons why it’s so important to do this now is because by doing it early, we’re setting the rules. We’re we’re laying out the playing field for how these companies are gonna come into our community. Whereas when we didn’t do that with Uber and Lyft, it it allowed the companies to say, well, you know, this is how it’s always been. We didn’t have regulation before.
Now if you try to regulate us, you’re hurting this industry that so many people rely on. Right now, if we regulate it from the start, everybody’s gonna know what the industry looks like from the get go, and it takes away that power from the tech companies to threaten to leave or threaten: “we’re gonna tell the community that you’re taking x, y, and z away, or you’re making this more or whatever.” If we set out the regulations early, then everybody’s playing by the same rules and it just gives the power to the communities rather than to the companies who, you know, may started with the power in the rideshare dynamic.
HOST
That’s absolutely true. And that’s how this needs to be. And so yeah. I couldn’t agree more.
I know people who watch this, I’m sure we’re going to get comments on this. Some people are for it, some people are against it. But, yeah, this is a way to do it to get ahead of this, as you said. So that’s super important.
And this this next thing I wanna talk about, which is even starting to evolve or maybe even a better term, devolve, in rideshare today is about insurance and insurance requirements.
And you bring this up in the article, and I really wanna cover this because it’s obviously a big focus of personal injury law. But you even said, insurance requirements must protect the public. And you said, when a vehicle causes a crash, who pays? Today, insurance minimums for ride share companies often leave victims uncompensated and confused about their rights. With robotaxis, the stakes are even higher.
Will liability rest with the driver who isn’t actually driving, the tech company that built the software, or the manufacturer that assembled the car? Without strong insurance minimums and clear assignment of responsibility, injured passion passengers and pedestrians will be forced into lengthy expensive fights just to recover basic medical skills. This is a huge red flag that is not being reported on at all.
We have talked on this show about articles involving crashes, some that are funny, some that are not, and some of the bugs. But this insurance requirement is major, and I’d love for you to just weigh in on more detail of what you’re seeing and what should happen.
BRYANT GREENING
Yeah. So, I want to talk about the next two topics, the insurance requirement and what we’ll get to is the idea of Tort Law. They do kind of overlap. So with this section, what I really wanna focus on is the insurance minimums. So let’s operate under the assumption, it should be a reality, that these vehicles carry liability insurance for injuries that they cause.
And you can imagine all sorts of situations where people get hurt in relation to AV or robotaxi rides. Imagine the car plowing into a pedestrian. Imagine the car rear-ending another vehicle in which the occupants of the robotaxi and the other car are both hurt. Imagine a situation where an uninsured driver hits the robotaxi. The person inside the robotaxi is hurt.
We can come up with a million different scenarios where accidents cause injuries. In the current rideshare environment, there is a serious issue related to the amount of insurance that’s available. When we first started LegalRideshare, every one of those rides was covered by a million dollars. No matter the scenario, there was a million dollars of coverage available to people who got hurt. And year after year after year, those insurance, policy less and less.
There are situations now in rideshare where there is no insurance. There are situations where there’s a small policy that everybody who might be injured in the event needs to split. So you can there are there are situations where there could be four people who are literally killed in a rideshare event, and there’s a $25,000 or $50,000 insurance policy for them all to tap into. That is an issue here because the the cities and the states failed to set regulations about insurance requirements and insurance minimums. Again, if we get in on this at the right time at the start, the municipalities can set insurance limits that ensure that everyone is adequately protected in these injury situations.
I don’t think that there should be an autonomous vehicle on the road that carries passengers around, particularly for profit, like the Waymos that doesn’t have at least a million dollars of coverage for the for each ride. I think it would be highly negligent of the cities and states, and, you know, areas in which these robotaxis are performing services to not require that, there is a high level of insurance for injuries that will occur as a result of of the use. Uber and Lyft and all the others have continually lowered their insurance, benefits, and the reason for that is purely money. It costs a lot less to insure a ride with thousand dollars of coverage than it does for a million. They are saving that money.
They are pocketing that money, and our communities are at risk as a result. If we can get in on this now and set insurance regulations from the start, these companies will know that if they’re gonna come to our if they’re gonna drive on our streets, if they’re gonna come to our communities, you’re coming with a million dollars, if not more. So I just don’t wanna see a scenario where, again, we repeat a situation where people can’t be compensated for things like the cost of medical treatment, their pain, their suffering, their lost wages. There are so many damages that can be caused. Who should bear that cost?
Not the passenger, not the public, the company that’s putting these cars on their road.
HOST
Yeah. I mean, I absolutely agree. And often when they’ve tried to cut corners like this, it ends up biting them anyways.
Now the question, as we talked about the first topic today is, well, whose system is it? Is it the software that broke? Is it the car?
Is it Uber themselves or Waymo? It’s clearly showing that it’s more on there side this time. And do you think because of that, they’re gonna be more willing to to have these insurance requirements or more aggressive against them? Because now there is no other party in the car. It’s their car.
BRYANT GREENING
Yeah. Well, that gets into the next topic, which is, the Tort Law. But I can briefly just say that I think that what will probably happen in these scenarios is that unless there are set standards that the governments require, they’ll come with a million dollars of coverage because that’s what Uber and Lyft did. They started high. They said, look at all this insurance that we have.
And then as the environment changes, as they become more ingrained in our communities, they start to cut corners and they start to find ways that they can, you know, poke holes or prod and save money, without anybody really throwing up their hands or, you know, having lawmakers have hearings or whatever it may be. They can find ways where they can pull almost a bait and switch. Say we came with a million dollars and now we’re gonna lower it to 250,000. And the next year, we’re gonna lower it to 50. And, that’s what was the rideshare playbook.
And I can imagine that unless there is a written law that says, robotaxis need a million dollars at a coverage period, then they’re gonna come high and they’ll chip away at it until it’s basically nothing just like the rideshare companies. Five years from now, we’ll be talking about how there’s very little insurance, how people are not protected. These vehicles are vastly under insured, and we we’ve just seen this before. And if we allow this to happen again, it’s our fault.
HOST
Yeah. Absolutely. We can’t. And that actually brings us to talk about Tort Law. Let’s let’s jump into that.
It’s our third and final topic for today. And you said, Tort Law can’t be an afterthought. You said that it isn’t really for autonomous vehicle crashes. If these cases are treated as products liability claims, victims face a far steeper climb, longer timelines, higher costs, and battles against deep pocketed corporations with teams of lawyers. Cities must work with state legislators now to decide how these claims would be handled before robotaxi dominate our roads.
For the public’s sake, it makes most sense to treat them as motor vehicle incidents with liability handled as ordinary auto insurance.
Can you explain a little bit more in detail about Tort Law and why they should be handled as insurance claims versus just product liability claims?
BRYANT GREENING
Yeah. So, what we’re getting at here is, Jared, you talked about at the beginning of our conversation that it’s kind of unclear at this point who is responsible for an AV crash. So just imagine a scenario where you’re in a robotaxi and that robotaxi rear ends another car.
It’s clearly the robotaxi’s fault, but what caused that event? Was it the software? Was it a defect to the vehicle itself? You know, was there a glitch that from a piece of equipment that they got from some third party contractor and, you know, it’s not actually Waymo, but it’s ABC corporation in Singapore. You could just imagine that it’s a very complex piece of technology.
As a lawyer who’s trying to protect somebody who got hurt, we know who are the responsible parties that are going to have to pay for things like medical bills. If somebody is killed, who’s gonna pay for the loss of life, who’s gonna pay for the loss of limb. And if it becomes a complex case involving products liability, it becomes much more difficult for victims to see the compensation. Products liability cases are extremely complicated. They require expert testimony.
They require oftentimes taking apart technology and finding out exactly the piece that went wrong so that the right entity can be held responsible. But that’s not really what this claim is. This is a car accident. This is a vehicle that got that got into an accident with another car on the road. And this can be made much simpler by just putting this into our regular Tort Law, which means personal injury, which means auto insurance.
So, instead of having this be a extremely complicated, expensive products liability case, we’re gonna make this an auto accident claim in which this vehicle, regardless of what went wrong with it, is covered under an auto insurance policy. And that allows for a personal injury attorney like myself to go to court and say, this vehicle caused a crash, and this vehicle is insured by this insurance company. And therefore, this insurance company must pay the medical treatment, the cost of lost wages, pain and suffering, loss of normal life, or whatever damage there is that we’re talking about. When vehicles are put onto our roadway and cause crashes, which these vehicles will, we don’t want to make them essentially bulletproof from liability by by making it unfeasible for the common person to bring a claim to recover their damages. We don’t want offices to turn down what would be considered smaller claims.
Somebody who has something that’s very serious to them, an emergency room visit, six weeks of physical therapy, maybe some pain management treatment, that case would be considered perhaps too small to bring as a product’s liability claim because it could cost tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to prosecute. We don’t want those clients to not be represented. We want people to be able to recover for what they’ve lost regardless of the size of the claim, whereas not only the biggest cases get the attention of the the law firm presentation and get made whole, but every person who suffers a loss as a result of this can have that, that advocacy. Make these claims auto claims, not products claims. And that has to be done at a government level.
That has to be defined within state laws to say, when you come to our state and you put AVs on the road, we’re not gonna allow you to skirt responsibility by making these massively comp complex legal issues. We’re gonna make you take this as an auto claim just as every other auto accident is, and we’re gonna allow injured people to be compensated and recover for their losses.
HOST
I really appreciate that explanation. That really shines a lot of light on this current situation and what can happen.
I guess my question to you then is, I think I already know the answer. Do you think that they’re gonna be pushing that in every state, these are products liability claims? Is that their goal? I I think that’s part of of their playbook. I think they’re gonna come in and they’re going to say, imagine that scenario where there’s the crash.
BRYANT GREENING
They’re gonna say, wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait.
This is not Waymo who caused this. They’re gonna make it very murky. They’re gonna say, this was actually an issue with one of the, you know, cameras or one of the mirrors or one of the other pieces that is at issue in each one of these vehicles. And we’re gonna bring in this other third party who may or may not have any sort of relationship to The US or may be hidden under a bunch of shell companies. And, no, they’re responsible.
So Waymo, we’re gonna hold up our hands and we’re gonna not gonna pay anything because this was not our problem. No. We want the company who puts the car on the road to take responsibility for the finished product and for crashes and injuries that it causes. I think it makes total sense for these companies to try to make these complicated products liability cases instead of auto accident claims. And that would fall right into the traps that they’re setting to try to evade liability, cut costs, and ultimately make it as cheap, and liability free.
It’s just as simple as possible to make a profit on our roads without taking responsibility for the harms that it causes.
HOST
Well, the silver lining here is, correct me if I’m wrong, but what you said is this does go state by state. Correct?
BRYANT GREENING
There certainly could be federal law in play here if they decided to go that path. But typically speaking, accident injury type claims are decided on a state level.
HOST
Yeah. So this could be proactive as you talked about initially to get the city and the states ahead of this so that they can’t use their playbook, it’ll be the playbook gets ripped up before they start. That really is the way to go here, as you pointed out.
To sum it up Bryant, I think you’ve done a really good job of laying the foundation of how to lay the foundation before they start disrupting the cities and towns and employment and drivers and everything else because there’s no reason that they shouldn’t start thinking about this. Every single week, we have a a a Waymo or autonomous vehicle article, and every week, it’s growing as far as location, what they’re doing, what services they’re offering.
BRYANT GREENING
This is not slowing down. It is obviously speeding up, but that doesn’t mean that we all need to be helpless, whether it be consumers, drivers, or government officials.
HOST
Thank you again for this, Bryant. For those who are watching, again, this will be on the legalrideshare.com website.
So, again, thank you so much, Bryant. And, as always, we’re gonna let you have the final say before we head into the weekend.
BRYANT GREENING
Yeah. As we as we’re heading into the weekend, I always remind everyone that LegalRideshare is available for free consultations. We deal with any accident and injury situation, we help you recover things like medical bills, lost wages, pain and suffering, any other damage that you sustain.
Please do not hesitate to reach out to us. The cases do not get better with time. Legalrideshare.com has all of our contact information, and you can actually contact us right through the website itself. So, please don’t hesitate, and we look forward to, hearing from you if you need us.
Thank you, Bryant.