Three men in India recently fell to their deaths after the taxi they were riding in was instructed by Google Maps to drive over an unfinished bridge, a local newspaper reports.
The Economic Times writes that the men, who were traveling from one city to another to attend a wedding, were traveling at night and thus “were unaware of the bridge’s condition.” The accident site was discovered by local residents about a day after the car fell over the edge of the bridge, when it was spotted lying under the unfinished structure.
A local official told reporters that the car was navigating using Google Maps at the time of the accident, and a family member of one of the victims also blamed the US company’s web application for the fatal incident: “They were checking the route with Google Maps and fell off an unfinished bridge,” the family member said. – “The road should have been closed. “The road should have been blocked, but it wasn’t. The maps should not have shown that the bridge was completed.”
This is not the first time that the tech giant’s web mapping platform has suggested that a user go to a place that ultimately leads to their death. As a rule, such incidents occur at night, when the user of Maps cannot see well what is happening around them and simply trusts the application to give them instructions. Last year, the company was sued by the family of a North Carolina man who died in 2022 after Google Maps advised him to drive across a bridge that had collapsed years earlier. The lawyer for the man’s family claimed that Google had been “misdirecting motorists” to the collapsed roadway for “years”.
Other, less fatal incidents have also led to lawsuits against the mapping application. In 2010, a woman from California sued the search giant, claiming that after trying to find a quick walking route to a nearby house, Maps advised her to walk across a four-lane highway with no sidewalks. As a result, she was hit by a car. Again, the woman was driving at night and said she believed that Google had guided her safely to the sidewalk.
