Presumably the algorithm had a pretty good idea of where the lanes were, and if the LIDAR detected a non moving object in an adjacent lane and decided it was fine to ignore it because it presumed it was not going to start moving, that's a pretty broken algorithm.

I don't have the link handy, but I was reading a webpage yesterday (related but not about this crash) which showed Google's self driving car's "view" of a road scene - it's clearly painted different color boxes and identified pedestrians, bicycles, other cars - along with "fences" where it had determined it'd need to slow or stop based on all those objects.

Either Uber's gear is _way_ less sophisticated (to the point of being too dangerous to use in public), it was faulty (but being used anyway, either because its self test is also faulty, or because the driuver/company ignored fault warnings) - or _perhaps_ Google's marketing material is faked and _everybodies_ self driving tech is inadequate?