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Comment by defen | Hacker News Reader

Between this and how they handled the girl who was killed by an Uber driver on New Year's Eve in San Francisco...my opinion of them has taken a decided turn for the worse in the past few weeks. And for both, I can't help but think that company culture is set from the top.

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I hadn't heard of this before, so I just googled it and read the top half-dozen news stories in addition to Uber's own blog. And honestly, I don't see that Uber did anything wrong. They opened with a statement offering condolences to the family. They then confirmed that the accident did not involve an active driver ("a vehicle or provider doing a trip on the Uber system"). They followed this up by urging the police to release information on the driver. So it sounds like they could confirm no active trips were involved in the accident, but had no way to find out if a driver without a trip was involved.

Then later (I think on Jan 2nd?) they updated their blog post, presumably in response to details of the driver being released, to confirm that the driver was an Uber driver (just not one on an active trip), and that he has been deactivated.

Then it closes by repeating the condolences to the family.

I agree that it would have been nice if Uber could have confirmed that the driver worked for them initially, but it's not obvious that they were even in a position to find that out before details on the driver were released.

Desperate attempts to wash themselves of liability.

If a Yellow Cab driver killed someone do you think they would deny, admit and then caveat with 'but he doesnt really work for us because he didnt have a passenger in the car and his lunch break was coming up blah blah blah'

>If a Yellow Cab driver killed someone do you think they would deny, admit and then caveat with

Yes, if a yellow cab driver hit someone with his own car while he was not working (which is what happened here), yellow cab would very much deny any liability.

Sophia Liu. 6 years old. Killed by Uber driver.

At first Uber denied the driver worked for them. Then they admitted the driver was with them but he wasn't "working" because he didn't have a passenger.

In constrast, some news reports claim that the driver believes he was working for Uber because he was searching for fares at the time of the accident.

I hadn't heard of this before. But I'm a bit confused, how does an uber driver hit someone while searching for fares? Searching for fares in Uber means sitting in your car waiting for your phone to ding. The only reason to be moving around without a passenger is if you think that a different neighborhood is a better place to be to find passengers (as distance to the prospective passenger is important), but driving to another neighborhood certainly doesn't qualify as "searching" for anything.

I would imagine that a large number of the drivers actually do drive around while searching as some areas are just awful to find parking in. Really the safest thing that Uber could do is to make it policy to only search over drivers that aren't in transit. Might hurt their buisness, but it is technically possible and most likely would give them a pretty strong defense against their product causing harm.

For reference: http://blog.uber.com/2014/01/01/statement-on-new-years-eve-a...

Note their sloppy job of hiding the livefyre comments only for this post (hint: they forgot to remove the comment count).

To play devil's advocate; how would you have had them handle the New Year's Eve situation better?

Did you read their statement?

They were more worried about being associated with the accident than the accident itself. Lots of weasel words and excuses in trying to claim that the driver didn't work for them, or that the driver wasn't active or doing a trip.

If I worked for Uber, I would have posted something simple and left it at that e.g.

"We have been informed by law enforcement that there has been a traffic accident in San Francisco involving an Uber driver. We send our deepest condolences to the family and victims of this tragic accident."

The end.

Just to play devil's advocate, would you apply the same standard to Musk's handling of the Tesla fires? His primary concern there seemed to be to disavow responsibility and blame the driver. While it's true that the fires were driver error, that doesn't change how combative he is about criticism (see: top gear).

No one died/was seriously injured in the Tesla fires. That makes it a completely different situation.

There are tens of thousands of traffic deaths per year.

Of course they care more about being associated with this particular incident than about the singular victim.

Are you going to call them out for not expressing condolences for the other hundred people that died to cars that day?

They could acknowledge the driver was working for them. That would be a start.

As I said in another comment, that even assumes they were capable of knowing the driver was working for them. In their blog post they asked police to release details of the driver, with a statement saying that any driver involved in a serious law enforcement issue would be deactivated (i.e. fired). Then in the update, they confirmed that the driver (whose details were presumably released at that point) did work for them and was in fact deactivated as a result.

To my reading, it sounds like they simply had no way of knowing that the driver worked for them without the police giving them details on the driver.

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