To summarize what happened - Uber's autopilot makes decisions about when emergency braking is necessary. But the software was braking so often on public roads that overall it's driving was erratic.
So Uber knowingly disabled emergency braking in all cases.
This essentially turned the car into a missile on our public roads.
at the time of the accident, the autopilot detected the pedestrian. Calculated an imminent collision, and initiated emergency braking. Instead of actually breaking, the message to break simply went to the logs.
Combine that with a safety driver that was looking down at the console and not up at the road - and the fatality was the result.
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It is completely beyond me why there isn't a battery of government saftey tests that vehicles with autopilot must pass before they get approved for use on our public roads.
How many times have you seen footage of a crash test dummy safely landing in an air bag? I want to see footage of crash test dummies getting pushed out in front of autopilot cars - and hopefully, never getting run down.