By Jamie Court and Nick Rowley, CAL MATTERS
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2026/02/uber-california-ballot-initiative-safety
A Santa Barbara woman was killed by an Uber Eats driver who was speeding 120 miles per hour while intoxicated, according to the family’s lawsuit. The driver already had a criminal history and was on probation for a second DUI. But he was good enough for Uber.
Uber’s inadequate background check system has resulted in other lawsuits and led to several New York Times stories that portrayed Uber as cheap and negligent when it comes to background checks and safety, for allowing violent convicts to drive and ignoring customer complaints.
Instead of making safety improvements, Uber is making a political investment in the form of a ballot measure in California.
Uber’s initiative would protect negligent drivers in every type of motor vehicle accident case, which would benefit corporations and insurance companies to the tune of billions of dollars each year.
The proposed law also would limit victims’ medical recovery and their freedom to contract with an attorney who’ll stand up against the mega-billion-dollar corporation and its insurance companies.
Uber’s propaganda claims its initiative will protect people from “billboard lawyers,” but that’s far from the truth. Uber’s real goal is getting richer by dodging accountability and driving a wedge between victims and lawyers.
Here’s how Uber’s “evil genius plan” works.
Most injury victims and families cannot afford a lawyer who bills by the hour. Contingency fee lawyers only get paid if they win and often invest years of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money into a case.
Uber’s proposed law says victims must keep 75% of the “total recovery,” which sounds like 25% goes to pay their attorneys, but that’s not true.
When accident victims need treatment and rehabilitation, providers treat them with the understanding they will be paid when the case is over, or “on a lien.” These medical bills are not recoverable costs under the initiative and would come out of the 25% that would fund the attorneys’ costs.
That means in many serious injury cases, the more lawyers do to help clients get care, the less they’ll get paid. A $1 million serious injury settlement, for instance, could result in medical liens and bills exceeding $250,000, and the lawyers would get nothing.
Uber’s law also makes it nearly impossible to find reputable doctors to provide treatment on a lien.
Creating even higher stakes, Uber has announced it would redeploy its self-driving cars and robotaxis on California roads in late 2026, after the election.
In Arizona in 2018, an Uber robotaxi was the first to kill a pedestrian. The National Transportation Safety Board report said Uber had an “inadequate safety culture,” and noted the Uber vehicle’s system detected the pedestrian six seconds before impact but didn’t hit the brakes. The company had decreased the number of expensive sensors on the car before the accident.
“Fully autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes billions of miles to demonstrate their safety in terms of fatalities and injuries,” a report from RAND Corporation has said. Uber’s partner, Nuro, had only logged 210,540 milesin California, according to a 2024 DMV report.
To be clear, Uber’s political strategy has nothing to do with helping people and everything to do with protecting itself and getting richer, just as it launches dangerous technology on California roads.
Uber and its insurers could hire lawyers without limit and face no penalty for legal delays or frivolous defenses.
Uber’s proposed law would give the corporation a license to kill, by making it next to impossible for most injury victims to get legal representation to match Uber’s lawyers — blocking fair access to our civil justice system when a person is hurt, maimed or killed.
