Sixty years ago, Ralph Nader walked into a fight he was not supposed to win. General Motors hired private detectives to trail him, tried to entrap him with women, and made his life miserable in ways that a Senate subcommittee later found deeply troubling. None of it stopped Unsafe at Any Speed from becoming a bestseller, and none of it stopped Congress from passing the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 — the law that gave the federal government the authority to set binding safety standards for every automobile sold in the United States.
Now Nader is back in the fight, and the adversary this time is not a Detroit carmaker but a San Francisco technology company that he says is using the same old playbook: lobby, spend, and legislate your way out of accountability before the public figures out what you are doing.
On June 4, 2026, Nader released an open letter addressed directly to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, condemning the company’s coordinated effort to limit legal liability for crashes involving both human rideshare drivers and autonomous vehicles.
The letter, published by Consumer Watchdog, takes aim at two specific legal maneuvers: an Uber-backed California ballot initiative targeting attorney fees and litigation access in accident cases, and a federal amendment tucked into a surface transportation bill by Representative Vince Fong of Bakersfield that consumer advocates say would provide sweeping immunity to rideshare companies for crashes caused by their drivers.
“Sixty years ago, the publication of Unsafe at Any Speed exposed a simple but consequential truth: when corporations are allowed to evade accountability for dangerous products, the public bears the cost in preventable deaths, injuries, and suffering,” Nader wrote.
A Two-Front War on Accountability
The California initiative in Uber’s corner, formally titled the “Preventing Accident Victims from Self-Dealing Attorneys Act,” would cap contingency attorney fees in auto accident cases at 25 percent, restrict how medical expenses are calculated, and prohibit certain financing arrangements that allow injured people to obtain treatment while their cases are pending. Uber frames the measure as consumer protection that would lower costs and ensure more money reaches victims directly. Critics counter that it would make serious injury cases economically unviable for plaintiffs’ attorneys to take, effectively slamming the courthouse door on injured Californians who cannot afford hourly legal fees.
Standing across from that initiative is the Alliance Against Corporate Abuse’s “Sexual Assault Against Rideshare Passengers and Drivers Prevention and Accountability Act,” which has already cleared the signature threshold for the November 2026 ballot. That counter-measure would reclassify rideshare companies as common carriers — the same legal category as taxis, buses, and trains — subjecting them to a higher duty of care and making them directly liable for driver misconduct regardless of the independent-contractor classification Uber has long used as a legal shield. It would also require annual fingerprint-based background checks and monthly public reporting of safety incidents. Court documents unsealed during related litigation revealed that Uber received reports of sexual assault or sexual misconduct at a rate approaching once every eight minutes between 2017 and 2022.
California voters may now face both measures on the same November ballot — a collision Nader views as evidence that the stakes could not be higher.
The 2 A.M. Vote That Nobody Was Supposed to Notice
The federal front opened on May 22, 2026, during what Consumer Watchdog called “a holiday weekend assault on consumer rights.” As the clock passed two in the morning over Memorial Day weekend, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee advanced an amendment to H.R. 8870, the BUILD America 250 Act — a five-year, roughly $580 billion surface transportation reauthorization bill. The amendment, sponsored by Rep. Fong, would prevent companies such as Uber from being held liable for maintaining or owning a network used by app-based drivers under certain circumstances, effectively preempting state common carrier and vicarious liability laws.
The committee passed the full BUILD Act by a lopsided 62-2 margin. The bill now heads to the full House and, if passed, to the Senate.
Nader’s letter names the timing directly. The amendment was “cynically advanced during a 2 AM House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee vote over Memorial Day weekend,” he wrote. “That amendment would provide sweeping protections for Uber against liability arising from crashes caused by drivers operating on its platform.”
Fong has defended the measure as an effort to reduce what he calls runaway litigation that inflates insurance costs. “Roughly one-third of a ride-share fare in California, and nearly one-half in Los Angeles, goes toward government-mandated insurance costs,” the congressman has stated. His office framed the amendment as helping curb “limitless, frivolous litigation against ride-share companies” and lowering transportation costs for consumers. The BUILD Act also includes provisions of Fong’s AMERICA DRIVES Act establishing federal guidelines for autonomous commercial vehicles — a parallel policy priority Fong has championed as a national security and competitiveness matter.
The Alliance Against Corporate Abuse saw the timing differently. “Uber couldn’t kill California’s accountability initiative at the ballot, so a California congressman is trying to do it in Washington — at 2 a.m.,” said AACA spokesperson Alex Stack, adding that the amendment could retroactively eliminate thousands of pending sexual assault cases and strip every state of the power to hold rideshare companies accountable when their drivers harm passengers.
Autonomous Vehicles Change the Stakes Entirely
Nader’s letter goes beyond the immediate legislative fight, placing it in the context of a technological transition that he argues makes accountability more urgent, not less. Uber has been accelerating partnerships with autonomous vehicle companies and expanding its robotaxi network across multiple cities. The letter argues that liability protections are being sought at precisely the moment when the consequences of system failures are most difficult to predict and most dangerous to minimize.
“Uber is actively pursuing legal and legislative changes in California and at the federal level that would weaken its accountability for injuries and deaths tied to its platform and the autonomous vehicle systems Uber is now rapidly deploying,” Nader wrote. “These efforts are not technical adjustments to litigation rules. They represent a fundamental attempt to undermine the rights of injured people and reduce corporate responsibility at the very moment rising autonomous systems are being tested on public roads at scale.”
To illustrate what he means by autonomous system failure, Nader points to a death that occurred eight years ago and has not been forgotten. In March 2018, a pedestrian named Elaine Herzberg was struck and killed in Tempe, Arizona, by an Uber test vehicle operating in autonomous mode. A safety backup driver was present but was not watching the road at the moment of impact. The crash led to a suspension of Uber’s autonomous vehicle testing program and eventually to federal investigations of the broader self-driving industry. In Nader’s framing, the Herzberg case is not ancient history — it is a preview of what immunity from legal accountability enables.
The Lesson of Sixty Years
Consumer Watchdog President Jamie Court, who has been pressing the issue before state and federal lawmakers, described Nader’s intervention as a call to defend an architecture that the original auto safety movement built over decades.
“Ralph Nader helped create the accountability system that forced automakers to make cars safer and saved countless lives,” Court said. “Uber is trying to weaken that system at the precise moment autonomous vehicles are being rolled out on public roads.”
The logic Nader advances is one he has been making since the Corvair era: that legal liability is not a tax on innovation, but the mechanism by which innovation is disciplined. When manufacturers and technology companies face genuine financial consequences for product failures that injure people, they have a structural incentive to engineer out the failures before they reach consumers. When that accountability is removed — whether by lobbying, legislation, or a midnight committee vote — the incentive disappears, and the public becomes the unwitting test subject for whatever the industry deploys next.
“The lesson of the last sixty years is clear: accountability produces safety. Immunity produces casualties,” Nader wrote.
The letter closes with a sentence addressed to Khosrowshahi personally, one that Nader clearly intends to be unanswerable: “If you claim your technology is safe, you should not fear a legal system of accountability.”