One thing we should take away from this incident is that we need to seriously push back on immediate "pedestrian's fault" rulings when police make them after a pedestrian/vehicle collision. It was readily apparent within hours that the story didn't add up, but people only paid so much attention because it's the first such crash involving an autonomous vehicle.
The more interesting question is how that shockingly poor dashcam footage came to be. That quality is so poor that I find it hard to believe that Uber is actively using it as a sensor input. Hell, it's worse than most dashcams I've seen on Youtube...
The release of the interior shot might have been an attempt to throw the 'safety' driver under the bus, so to speak, and while her inattentiveness was a very serious matter, it also does not look good for Uber.
Certainly Uber the company is systemically responsible for this failure, but the driver also had a role in preventing harm, and they were negligent. There's more than enough blame to share.
It probably isn't used as sensor input. It's probably an off-the-shelf dashcam (the cheapest they could find that could also record the driver) added as an afterthought. It also wouldn't surprise me if the windshield were tinted, which would make the dashcam recording even darker (since it's behind the windshield).
Maybe you’re thinking of the black out style tinting that you see in movies but most people tint to filter out like 5-20% light.
"Transparent material that is installed, affixed or applied to the topmost portion of the windshield if:
(a) The bottom edge of the material is at least twenty-nine inches above the undepressed driver's seat when measured from a point five inches in front of the bottom of the backrest with the driver's seat in its rearmost and lowermost position with the vehicle on a level surface.
(b) The material is not red or amber in color."[0]
and
"Windshields Sunscreening devices must be applied above the AS-1 line. If there is no AS-1 line, sunscreening devices must end five inches below the top of the windshield. Sunscreening devices may not be red, amber, or blue in color. Sunscreening devices, when measured in combination with the original glass, must have a light transmittance value of 25% or more. Sunscreening devices, when measured in combination with the original glass, must have a luminous reflectance value of 25% or less. A clear (un-tinted) UV film is allowed anywhere on the front windshield without a medical exemption being required."[1]
[0] https://www.azleg.gov/ars/28/00959-01.htm
[1] https://www.dps.texas.gov/rsd/vi/consumerinfo/windowTint.htm
Big difference. I'm not aware of anywhere that it's legal to tint your windshield below the top 4-5 inches. (Not saying it isn't but it certainly isn't in AZ or TX)
In my country, you can put a tinted film on the whole windshield, as long as it allows at least 75% of the light to pass (the side and rear windows can be much darker: the film must allow at least 28% of the light). They're a common sight.
I'm not being facetious, but a little top-down pressure can go a long way. This isn't about a grand conspiracy as much as it is about simple human nature, and the act to please those above you, keep your job, and move up yourself.
"The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation."
In 2012, Australian psychologist Gina Perry investigated Milgram's data and writings and concluded that Milgram had manipulated the results, and that there was "troubling mismatch between (published) descriptions of the experiment and evidence of what actually transpired." She wrote that "only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real and of those, 66% disobeyed the experimenter". She described her findings as "an unexpected outcome" that "leaves social psychology in a difficult situation." In the journal Jewish Currents, Joseph Dimow, a participant in the 1961 experiment at Yale University, wrote about his early withdrawal as a "teacher", suspicious "that the whole experiment was designed to see if ordinary Americans would obey immoral orders, as many Germans had done during the Nazi period."