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Comment by jussij | Hacker News Reader

> but doesn't cover outliers like my mother who would have been knocked down at least, killed at worst

So would it be ok if that self driving car did see the pedestrian walking down the freeway, tried to avoid the collision, looses control and end up running into the car coming the other way, killing all the passengers in both cars?

The car was traveling at high speed down a dual carriage way (i.e. freeway) in the middle of the night.

In a situation like that any sudden reaction by the on board computer is never going to end well.

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So in Arizona after running over and killing a careless pedestrian, human drivers just drive on at the same speed with all care and attention and don't slam on the brakes in fear and panic and usually spin?

That's a valid point to make in the general case, for times when you have no good option, and hitting the pedestrian in the crosswalk may be the lesser evil.

But in this case, hard breaking would have been plenty fine and with little downside risk (beyond the general problem of excessive unnecessary braking). The car's computer was aware of an obstacle in sufficient time, as would a human driver have been.

> hitting the pedestrian in the crosswalk may be the lesser evil.

I would not go so far as to say that, only because if that had been the situation then the car and it's onboard system would have to take the all the blame.

But in this case, based on the footage I saw the car was travelling down a freeway at high speed and at night.

Now some of the blame might be attributably to the car, but the real cause of the accident was the pedestrian walking down a freeway, so it seems clear most of the blame hast to be attributed to the pedestrian.

> But in this case, hard breaking would have been plenty fine and with little downside risk

Except to any cars that might be following behind that then end up ploughing into the back of that hard breaking car.

The car was traveling at 44mph. A speed reduction to even 14mph would have probably made the collision survivable. If your argument is that the car was unable to drop 30mph over several seconds without causing an accident or swerving into opposing traffic, I don't know - maybe the self driving isn't there and shouldn't be on the road at all.

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