neither the destroyed bridge nor the road leading to it had any barriers or warning signs to alert drivers of the hazard.

Well it seems clear who is actually to blame here.

Ridiculous. If you blindly drive over a bridge that isn't there because a map says so, you're an idiot. Congratulations for the Darwin Award.

I'm not going to talk about this from a legal standpoint because I'm not a qualified lawyer, nor do I know enough about the law.

This philip guy, as unfortunate as his death is, is not google's fault. As the driver of the car he is the highest authority and should make decisions after weighing the information. I understand that it was a dark and rainy night, however he was overriding his sight distance, which is something you are taught not to do in drivers ed.

Although his death was preventable, the blame rests on philip first of all, then the property management companies (which the family is suing), and to a much much lesser extent on google.

Would he have taken this route if not for maps? Unlikely. Does this mean that google maps deserves the blame? No.

As unhappy as I am with google these days, this one isn't on them - atleast not to any point of legal liability.

Lawyers for the Paxsons allege that several people have tried to flag the washed-out bridge to Google and have included email correspondence between a Hickory resident who tried to use the “suggest an edit” feature in 2020 to get the company to address the issue.

If Google were notified of this, and failed to act in a timely manner, they should face consequences. Obviously they're not the only people who dropped the ball, but they definitely failed this person.

When I think of the situations that occur in everyday traffic and how people behave there, completely without google being involved, I am absolutely not surprised at the level of carelessness that radiates from such events. Though it could also be my lower trust in services like google maps because I have a deeper knowledge of the technology behind it than most people. There may be people who think of google maps as some kind of authority that has proven to not be wrong at any time...

If google had enough information and time to correct such map errors and did not out of neglect, they may still be held accountable. And I think that this is a good thing.

Safety regulations are written in blood, warning labels are written by morons (usually)

We had this years ago...

https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/03/gps-tracking-disaster-japanese-tourists-drive-straight-into-the-pacific

We do so much for stupid people that some times it feels like if we do any more, we'll lose our freedom and quality of life. There's always going to be outliers and we should just be impressed they made it as far as they did. We can't cater to them for everything.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Paxson, who was 47 and from Hickory, North Carolina (about 60 miles north-west of Charlotte), was returning home from his daughter’s ninth birthday before the accident, his mother-in-law wrote in a post on Facebook.

In addition to Google, the Paxson family’s lawsuit names a number of private property management companies who were responsible for the land where the crash happened and for surrounding plots, according to the Associated Press.

Lawyers for the Paxsons allege that several people have tried to flag the washed-out bridge to Google and have included email correspondence between a Hickory resident who tried to use the “suggest an edit” feature in 2020 to get the company to address the issue.

In 2020, an 18-year-old Russian motorist froze to death after he and a friend were stranded in a vehicle for a week after following a Google Maps route through Serbia’s “road of bones”.

In 2019, a truck driver in Jakarta, Indonesia, drove off a cliff after following a Google Maps route that was only meant for motorcycles, the Straits Times reported.

In 2015, 51-year-old Zohra Hussain died in a fiery car accident in Indiana after her husband, who was following his Nissan Sentra’s built-in GPS, drove off an unmarked toll road that led to a demolished bridge.

The original article contains 481 words, the summary contains 211 words. Saved 56%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I feel like it might be interested to add this. Said "bridge" on OpenStreetMap https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/35.78168/-81.28259

There’s a few photos from this article. It’s a dirt road, somewhere where you should (and he probably did) drive slowly.