Could have been equipment failure on the truck - a tie rod end failing or such will create some interesting behaviors.

> I believe the argument is the software will improve to eventually be as good or better than humans, and I have a hard time not believing that.

I find it easy to believe that software won't manage to deal well with all the weird things that reality can throw at a car, because we suck at software as humans in the general case. It's just that in most environments, those failures aren't a big deal, just retry the API call.

Humans can write very good software. The Space Shuttle engineering group wrote some damned fine software. They look literally nothing like the #YOLO coding that makes up most of Silicon Valley, and deal with a far, far more constrained environment as well than a typical public road.

Self driving cars are simply the most visible display of the standard SV arrogance - that humans are nothing but a couple crappy cameras and some neural network mush, and, besides, we know code - how hard can it be? That approach to solving reality fails quite regularly.