Philip Paxson’s family are suing the company over his death, alleging that Google negligently failed to show the bridge had fallen nine years earlier.
Mr Paxson died in September 2022 after attempting to drive over the damaged bridge in Hickory, North Carolina.
A spokesperson for Google said the company was reviewing the allegations.
The case was filed in civil court in Wake County on Tuesday.
Mr Paxson, a father of two, was driving home from his daughter’s ninth birthday party at a friend’s house and was in an unfamiliar neighbourhood at the time of his death, according to the family’s lawsuit.
His wife had driven his two daughters home earlier, and he stayed behind to help clean up.
“Unfamiliar with local roads, he relied on Google Maps, expecting it would safely direct him home to his wife and daughters,” lawyers for the family said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.
“Tragically, as he drove cautiously in the darkness and rain, he unsuspectingly followed Google’s outdated directions to what his family later learned for nearly a decade was called the ‘Bridge to Nowhere,’ crashing into Snow Creek, where he drowned.”
Local residents had repeatedly contacted Google to have them change their online maps after the bridge collapsed in 2013, the suit claims.
I was always told not to drive if you can’t see passed your breaking distance,… If you drive yourself off a bridge you were driving when you shouldn’t have or driving too fast for the visual distance you had. There might have been a lot of negligence, but driving when you can’t see certainly also was a big one too, imho. 🧐
Anyway, any TomTom to this day still will tell you to “drive straight over the roundabout” when it wants you to exit the street in front of you (when set to my native language at least anyway), and the first GPS I owned even awkwardly kept telling me once to drive right, off a bridge, to turn onto the highway it went over… I could have listened and died, but instead I just laughed at the occurence and made it a funny conversation-starter at times. 😅
Somehow blaming a commercial end-product that has no ability to think anything (and which is nothing but some basic codelogic), while I, as the actual being that has sentience and (arguably 😅) does have the power to think; can judge my environment; and deductively think/act accordingly, but was not exercising these abilities at the time doesn’t sound like a smart action there. 😅 Especially if it’s because you instead trusted all that to what basically isn’t much more than a blind script guiding a voice-player running on the least amount of hardware needed to be able to sell it to consumers. That just makes it a very bad and tragic human error.
Anyway, I still don’t wish this to anyone and I feel for the family’s loss (and I’m definitely not pro-Google either), but if you’re driving blind while putting decisions that possibly have dangerous outcomes into an Android GPS app that has no known concept of fear, danger, sight, or even its own presence in a situation where you shouldn’t have been driving in at all, unrelated to having a GPS in use or not, it will always sound awkward blaming the inanimate tools for it…
Well, that was a longer rant than intended,… Apparently stuff like this pushes some buttons I didn’t even know I had. 😅