Three Men Die After Google Maps Reportedly Told Them to Drive Over an Unfinished Bridge

Three men in India recently plummeted to their deaths after the taxi they were traveling in was instructed to drive across an unfinished bridge by Google Maps, a local newspaper has reported.

The Economic Times writes that the men, who were traveling from one city to another en route to a wedding were driving at night and, thus, were “unaware of the bridge’s condition.” The crash scene was discovered by locals approximately a day after the car plunged over the bridge’s edge when the vehicle was spotted lying under the unfinished structure.

A local official told journalists that the car had been navigating with Google Maps at the time of the crash, while a family member of one of the victims similarly blamed the U.S. company’s web app for the deadly incident: “They were checking the route using Google Maps and fell from the incomplete bridge,” the family member said. “The road should have been blocked, but it wasn’t. The maps shouldn’t have shown that the bridge was complete.”

This wouldn’t be the first time that the tech giant’s web mapping platform has told a user to drive to a location that ended up killing them. Typically, these incidents always seem to happen at night, when the Maps user can’t see what’s happening around them very well, and merely has to trust the app to give them proper instructions. Last year, the company was sued by the family of a North Carolina man who died in 2022 after Google Maps reportedly told him to drive across a bridge that had collapsed years earlier. An attorney for the man’s family claimed that Google had “misdirected motorists” onto the collapsed roadway “for years.”

Other, less lethal incidents have also inspired lawsuits against the map app. In 2010, a California woman sued the search giant, claiming that, after trying to look up a quick walking route to a nearby house, Maps instructed her to walk across a four-lane highway with no sidewalks. As a result, the woman was struck by a car. Again, the woman was traveling at night and said she believed that Google was directing her safely to a sidewalk.

Gizmodo reached out to Google for comment on the recent fatal incident. In a statement provided to Futurism, the company wrote: “Our deepest sympathies go out to the families.” The Google spokesperson added: “We’re working closely with the authorities and providing our support to investigate the issue.”