The article was un-necessarily snarky. Did the author believe Google to be lying about a human being in control? If not, why make fun of Google for blaming driver error for the accident?
NHSTA should place data loggers in self-driving vehicles. In case of an impact (crash-detection) these data loggers should be able to precisely tell who was in control, person behind the wheel or computer?
"Oh, I don't think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before and it has always been due to human error."