Robotaxi Hits Mailboxes Causing Legal Trouble for CEO
The self-driving car company, Ramble, is in legal trouble after one of its fully autonomous robotaxis crashed into and then pushed several US Postal Service mailboxes for more than five miles through the city. The car was eventually disabled while it waited for a traffic light to change by a pedestrian that placed a traffic cone on the windscreen blocking the car's sensor system. The fire department had to extract the two passengers from the back seat. They were not injured during the accident. The San Francisco police impounded the car and wrote the internal computer a traffic citation for reckless driving and leaving the scene of an accident. The US Postal Inspection Service examined the accident scene and the mailboxes and plan to charge the company and its CEO with damage to federal property, theft of mail, possession of postal property, and assaulting a mail carrier who was attempting to collect mail from one of the mailboxes at the time of the accident. The federal crimes alone carry a maximum of 25 years in prison. The California Department of Motor Vehicles immediately suspended Ramble's permit for self-driving robotaxi service and then created an investigative committee to examine why the DMV thought it was a good idea to allow that permit. Ramble's CEO, Jeffrey Hastings, held a hastily assembled press conference in which he promised that the accident would be examined closely and that issues in the self-driving system would be improved. Hastings then bragged about how well the car had done in balancing the mailboxes for so long and claimed that the company should get a Guinness World Record for that alone. He then jumped into a nearby Ramble robotaxi and told it to take him to Ecuador. The car, knowing its permit was suspended, spit out an error message and then caught on fire. Postal Inspectors extricated Hastings from the burning car and arrested him. The National Association of Letter Carriers commented on the crime as another example of the extreme dangers that their members face every day and then asked for hazard pay.