Who's Liable When Your Self-Driving Uber Crashes?
Waymo just told Uber it's building its own app for Austin and Atlanta. Behind the split is a messier question riders rarely think about: who pays when the car with no driver hits something.
Uber's stock fell more than 4% on July 24, closing below $66 a share, its lowest point in more than a year, after Waymo told the company it plans to launch its own app in Austin and Atlanta. The two have run an exclusive robotaxi arrangement in both cities since 2025. By January 2028, that exclusivity ends.
The breakup won't be sudden. Waymo's current fleet stays on the Uber app through at least May 2028, and the companies' contract runs its course before either side goes its own way. But the notice formalizes a drift that's been visible for months: Waymo hasn't added a single new Uber city since last June, choosing instead to expand on its own into six additional markets. It now runs fully driverless service in 11 U.S. metro areas without Uber at all, delivering more than 500,000 paid rides a week.
Behind the split, according to Bloomberg's reporting on the negotiations, is a list of grievances Uber has been keeping. Waymo vehicles have driven into flooded roads despite a software recall meant to stop exactly that. They've illegally passed stopped school buses in Austin. In May, dozens of empty Waymos circled a single cul-de-sac in Atlanta for reasons Waymo blamed on Uber's own routing software. Uber says it learned about the school bus incidents from media reports, not from Waymo directly.
Lyft has the same arrangement with Waymo in a smaller number of cities, and its CEO summed up the power dynamic bluntly.
Waymo controls the vehicles, the software and, increasingly, the direct relationship with riders, which leaves any partner negotiating from a weaker seat. Uber has been hedging for months, investing in rival autonomous-vehicle companies Avride and Nuro and signing a deal worth more than $1 billion for up to 50,000 Rivian-built robotaxis. None of those partners operate at anything close to Waymo's scale yet. Uber's own stock is down roughly 20% this year, weighed down by investor worry that Waymo's growth will eventually eat into the ride-hailing business Uber only turned profitable a few years ago."Situationship."
David Risher, Lyft CEO, describing his company's Waymo partnership, November 2025
So if a driverless Uber hits something, who actually pays?
It's a question most riders never think to ask until they need the answer. As of April 2024, the California Department of Motor Vehicles alone had logged 708 Autonomous Vehicle Collision reports. California is only one of the states where robotaxis operate.
Fault doesn't collapse into a single party the way it does with two human drivers trading insurance information. According to Nolo's legal encyclopedia, liability for a self-driving crash can land on any of several parties depending on what actually went wrong: the vehicle operator, if a human was supposed to be supervising and failed to; the vehicle owner, which for a Waymo-on-Uber ride can mean Uber itself shares responsibility for injuries caused through its platform; the manufacturer, if a defect in the car's design caused the crash; the software developer, if the self-driving system itself made the error; or another driver entirely, if a human on the road caused the collision and the robotaxi was just unlucky enough to be there.
The Society of Automotive Engineers ranks driving automation on a scale from 0 to 5. Waymo's vehicles operate at Level 4 — capable of full self-driving within specific routes and conditions, no human backup required. That's a meaningfully different legal animal than the Level 2 systems in most cars on the road today, like Tesla's Autopilot, where a human is still supposed to be paying attention. The distinction matters in court: the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigated 956 crashes involving Tesla's Autopilot and concluded the system had a "critical safety gap" that contributed to at least 467 collisions, 15 deaths and 54 injuries, a finding built on the idea that drivers were relying on automation the system wasn't built to fully replace, since Autopilot is a Level 2 system that still expects a human to be ready to take over.Tesla settled the first major lawsuit over the technology, involving a 2018 crash that killed Walter Huang, on the eve of trial in 2024, for an undisclosed amount.
Human error still causes most crashes on American roads by a wide margin: of the 38,824 people killed in car crashes in 2020, 11,654 involved drunk driving and 11,258 involved speeding, according to NHTSA figures cited by Nolo. That statistic is the entire argument autonomous-vehicle companies make for why the technology is worth the risk. Whether regulators and juries agree, case by case, is still being worked out: 29 states have passed laws specifically addressing autonomous vehicles, and governors in 10 more have issued executive orders on the subject, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Is Uber responsible if the Waymo it dispatched crashes?
Potentially, yes, at least in part. Because Uber is the platform that matched the rider with the vehicle, it can share liability for injuries and losses even though it doesn't build the car or write the driving software. That's part of what makes the Austin and Atlanta split notable: once Waymo runs its own app in 2028, that layer of shared responsibility shifts, and riders booking directly through Waymo will be dealing with a different company than the one whose brand they trust today.
What Uber actually tells riders today
None of that legal complexity shows up in the app. When Uber first rolled out Waymo rides in Austin, it described a seamless handoff: riders requesting an UberX, Uber Green, Comfort or Comfort Electric trip could be matched with a fully autonomous, all-electric Jaguar I-PACE at no extra cost, with 24/7 customer support built into both the Uber app and the vehicle itself. At launch, the service covered 37 square miles of the city. Nowhere in that pitch is a sentence about what happens if the car in front of you runs a red light.
That gap between the marketing and the fine print is exactly what tends to surface after a crash, when a rider discovers that "who do I call" and "who is legally responsible" are two very different questions — and that the second one may not have a clean answer until Waymo's own sensor logs, which regulators now require companies to preserve, get pulled into evidence.
