What I don't understand is why the pedestrian didn't see or hear the car. She seems totally oblivious. Surely she would have seen the headlights. It is possible she had some sensory impairment, either visual or auditory.
She didn't even look at the road at all, not even during the very moment of impact. She was looking the other way 100% of the time right up until the crash. She didn't even care enough to look at the road at all because "looking at the road" was WAY too much work for her.
Pretty sure she didn't bother to do some kind of "physics deceleration analysis" before she crossed the road LOL
How can you expect and trust that a driver to see you/stop for you? Maybe he's not paying attention, maybe he's texting, etc...
The AV should definitely have at least tried to stop, it screwed up. Pedestrian has the right of way.
Having said that, I wouldn't want folks on HN to take this as an example and say "hey I am entitled to cross the road without looking, cars would decelerate for me and will always stop for me because i am entitled to right-of-way". WRONG
You cross the road without looking, the car hits you. Sure, AV or human-driver, the car would always be wrong.
You are "right" because you are the pedestrian and have right of way. You win the logical argument, but you are the one spending a year in the hospital.
Do you want to be "right"? Is taking a quick look at the road that much work for you?
Cars are highly visible to pedestrians (due to headlights). I think pedestrians assume that they themselves are equally as visible to the car driver too - "I can see them, so they must be able to see me." is the subconscious line of thought I think.
Often though pedestrians get "lost" in the lights of oncoming vehicles or the brake lights of cars ahead, or are just in your blind spots.
The other thing is, I've noticed that people who have never learnt to drive often don't really appreciate how cars act and are not very good at estimating the distances involved. You've probably noticed this when crossing streets - some people take some eye-raising risks when crossing the road while others wait ... guess which ones are the drivers who are experienced with how cars/drivers act!
My guess here is the poor woman was stationary in the median thinking "Should I cross?" as the car was approaching. She probably then decided she had time to make it across before the Uber car got there so started to cross the street, perhaps assuming the vehicle was further away than it was, or would slow down since the "driver" would see her. We've all done this I am sure ... sometimes with time to spare, sometimes cutting it a bit close.
Perhaps if this was what happened, the Uber car "saw" her stationary in the median and disregarded her as a stationary road-side object and carried on until it was too late. IIRC these systems need to disregard static objects at the side of the road (e.g. signs, trees etc) otherwise they'd be slamming the brakes on all the time. Perhaps the initial movement she made into the road was disregarded as "sensor noise" (e.g. you can see objects "jumping around" a bit in this video from Uber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCkkhlxYNwE) from what it thought was a static object, but that would not explain the apparent total non-reaction from the vehicle when she was clearly in the path.
I've driven a XC90 a few times - it has auto-lane keeping when using cruise control on the highway. Perhaps that was what was driving, not the Uber system.
Tragic stuff regardless of what happened.
Regardless of how I do this, it's a pretty accepted contract and definitely still piles the fault on the SDV in my opinion.
I mean, she began to cross fron the center (left) to the right, walked a bit, saw the car light, stopped, and then decided to cross again? The sensor would have seen her as a stationary object in a lane the car wasn't drving into. And then she begans to walk, and this movement is disregarded as noise in the beggining, and then it's too late because she walked ? It just takes few steps to cross a lane, about 5 or 6...