Police consider charges after a rogue VW robot terminated a human coworker this week in Germany.
The 22-year-old victim was murdered by a stationary bot he was helping to install at the Volkswagen plant near Frankfurt when it suddenly grabbed the young man and smashed him into a metal plate.
The suspect terminator unit normally performs assembly tasks, so its gruesome glitch on Monday remains unexplained.
A spokesman for the automaker insists there was no technological defect which prompted the machine to turn murderous, but that the weird incident was the result of “human error.”
A fellow human contractor who was also assisting with the operation when the rogue VW robot seized his associate, struck him repeatedly, then crushed him to death, was not harmed in the surprise assault, the company’s spokesman added.
German investigators are still probing the employee’s murder, and pondering as well the rather unique issue of who they should actually charge for the intentionally brutal crime.
