Something that probably should have been in the article's title that this accident occurred because the human driver in the other car failed to yield. While Uber is certainly a very flawed company, neither its technology nor its people were at fault here.
Say you're approaching an intersection with a green light while another car is traveling perpendicular at a moderately high rate of speed – perhaps just 5mph faster than their maximum safe stopping speed. You're completely allowed to just keep driving through the intersection, and when they hit you, they will be at fault. However, you could have avoided the collision by recognizing the situation and slowing down – and this is a type of analysis that autonomous vehicles are specially suited for compared to human drivers.
Driving around Houston this happens to me several times a day. Obviously the technology wasn't designed for essentially "normal" driving conditions.
Anecdote related to TFA:, a couple months back an SUV stopped at a marked crosswalk with ped traffic. I stopped in right lane next to it. When peds cleared it began rolling before I did, and once I commenced it braked hard. I braked, looking for unseen peds and noticed it's nav gear & small uber decal. No additional peds were in crosswalk. There were dozens og people on either sidewalk for an art fair. I wonder if human intervention caused the hard braking or the large amount of data points on the periphery.
This isn't tangential to the engineering problems surrounding self-driving cars, rather it's at the heart of those problems and why it's an order of magnitude (or more) harder than what so many people assume. It's not insurmountable, but whenever I hear people making comments like "self-driving cars are a solved problem, and are an inevitability in the near future", I cringe so hard. With a lot of care and skepticism, we can all make self-driving cars a thing in our lifetimes. Or, with a lot of overenthusiastic credulousness, we can make self-driving cars briefly a thing in the very near future, which get regulated out of existence for the remainder of our lives by a relatively small number of high-profile accidents like this.
But I think your other point about the inevitability of regulators killing self driving cars if they are short of perfect is just as cringe-worthy, as at least as harmful.
Self-driving cars should be allowed to roll if they are better than humans, which might be the case already.
It is hard, but not impossible, for government to do the right thing.
Meanwhile, multiple brands of existing, human-driven cars already have the ability to detect an impending collision and avoid it, either through automatic emergency braking or other mechanisms. If Uber isn't even caught up to the stuff that's in cars for the general public, then what the hell are they doing?
Without more details we can't say whether this accident would have been avoidable with those systems.
Other driver going faster than they should? Switch lanes and avoid the situation.
Turning into traffic and there is a car in your intended lane signalling that they're going to move out of the lane? Wait for them to actually move and make space for you - don't trust that their lights are the whole truth.
Let's put ourselves in the shoes of someone who reads this headline and gets a quick summary. This headline makes it sound like Uber isn't confident of its technology and they think their technology might be the cause and hence they are suspending it. In this case, it seems pretty clear, as confirmed by the police officer, that Uber's car wasn't at fault.