"it is striking that the system spent long seconds trying to decide what exactly is sees in front (whether that be a pedestrian, bike, vehicle or whatever else) rather than making the only logical decision in these circumstances, which was to make sure not to hit it."

That is striking. It always sort of bothered me that AI is really a big conglomeration of many different concepts. What people are working on is deep learning for machines, but we think that means "replicating human skill/behavior". It's not. Machines will be good at what they are good at, and humans good at what they're good at. It's an uphill battle if your expectation is for a machine that processes like a human, because the human brain does not process things like computer architectures do.

Now, if some aspiring scientist wanted to skip all that and really try to replicate (in a machine) how the human brain does things, I think such a person would be starting from a very different perspective than even modern AI computing.