[foobarian]

It surprises me how downplayed this is. If you legally treat the Uber car as an ordinary car that happens to have a really fancy auto-assist, the driver should be on the hook. This person had eyes off the road for 5 seconds prior to the crash according to the article.

There was a case some years ago in Boston where a subway rear-ended another one because the operator was texting. The driver was fired and probably would have been prosecuted if there had been fatalities. Taking eyes off the road for this long seems insane to me.