Consumer Watchdog, License To Kill Report Findings

• Medical Cost Caps Limit Access To Care: Uber’s California proposal would cap recoverable medical expenses at levels tied closely to Medicare reimbursement rates. These limits could prevent accidents victims from getting care and healthcare providers from treating crash victims because the capped reimbursements would not cover the actual cost of care.
• Proposed CA Law Would Block Seriously Injured Victims From Finding Lawyers: Under Uber’s proposed California law, seriously injured accident victims would not be able to get contingency lawyers because the proposal makes it economically unviable for an attorney to take a case on a contingency basis. The proposal requires that, for the purposes of an attorney fees contract, medical expenses and contingency fees come out of the same 25% pot that attorneys would receive. If, for example, medical expenses total more than $250,000 on a $1 million accident policy, the attorney would receive nothing.
• Product Liability Cases Would Be Eviscerated: The initiative would also apply to product defect claims related to vehicle crashes, such as those that have been used to hold the makers of semi-autonomous vehicles accountable. This would make it significantly harder to pursue cases involving defective airbags, braking systems, steering failures, battery problems, or faulty software. These lawsuits have historically played a critical role in forcing manufacturers to improve vehicle safety. Weakening these legal tools would reduce incentives for companies to address dangerous defects, including those in autonomous driving systems.
• Liability Limits Will Normalize Robotaxis Before They Are Ready For The Road: Uber has announced plans, for example, to deploy up to 20,000 robotaxis in partnership with autonomous vehicle developer Nuro over the next six years. However, its partner Nuro’s testing record in California lags far behind competitors. Nuro could not go 700 miles without a human intervention when Waymo could go nearly 20,000 miles. In 2025, Nuro vehicles reportedly logged fewer than 160,000 autonomous miles in California, compared with more than 3 million miles driven by Waymo. The Nuro cars are cheaply made and without the sensor capacity of Waymo’s.