In the ongoing investigation following the recent Tempe, Arizona car accident involving an Uber self-driving vehicle and a pedestrian who unfortunately lost her life, most of the focus has been on that singular instance and what might have happened to cause the car to crash into the victim while traveling on automonous with a safety driver on board. When investigators realized that the vehicle should have been able to detect the pedestrian with the level of infrared technology the vehicle had, the investigation turned inward.

Now The New York Times is reporting that Uber’s self-driving vehicles were failing to live up to the company’s expectations months before the crash. According to the investigation, Uber’s self-driving cars were struggling to drive through construction areas on roads and highways as well as near tall vehicles like commercial trucks. Uber’s human safety drivers had to intervene far more often than the drivers of other self-driving vehicles currently being tested that were placed on the roads by other automonous vehicle competitors like Waymo.

Uber has been testing self-driving vehicles on the road since December 2016, when it first became possible for Uber passengers to request a self-driving vehicle in San Francisco. In 2017, the company entered an agreement with Volvo to bring 24,000 self-driving Uber cars to rideshare passengers in the coming years. Now, all of the company’s self-driving vehicle testing has come to an abrupt halt.

A woman in Tempe, Arizona was killed by a self-driving Uber car late Sunday night or early Monday morning. She was crossing the street outside of a crosswalk. The Uber vehicle was traveling in automonous mode with a human safety driver at the wheel when it struck the woman.

Early in 2018, the San Luis Obispo Police Department arrested Alfonso Alarcon-Nunez in Santa Maria on suspicion of rape and burglary charges.

According to the investigation and to other reports, Alarcon-Nunez, an alleged Uber driver operating in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara, allegedly used his driver status for Uber to lure and then rape female passengers and rob their homes.

Rideshare companies are providing new alternatives to transportation that makes it easier to get people where they need to go. They don’t have to worry about driving in a new place, paying for gas, or finding a parking space. All people who want to use the service have to do is download the app to request a ride. Uber is one of these companies and are present in many major cities and towns.

Big news out of the state of Pennsylvania. According to the Attorney General’s Office, thousands of Uber drivers were unaware of an alleged data breach. Did Uber owe a duty to private citizens to inform drivers of this?

On March 5, 2018, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro filed a lawsuit against Uber Technologies, Inc. for violating Pennsylvania’s data breach notification law. Uber knew for more than a year that a data breach potentially impacting 57 million passengers and drivers around the world had happened – but the company failed to disclose the breach until last November.