Watch again. Those pedestrians were in the crosswalk before the car turns. That's illegal at best, and definitely dangerous for those pedestrians. The car wasn't taking a tight right turn either.
The car aborted (or was aborted by the driver) and stopped before finishing it's turn on the road from what I saw, leaving it at about a 45 degree angle instead of the 90 degrees it would eventually reach if it continued turning.
Was it though? Look closely, and maybe replay it a few times (I just did, another response to a different comment of mine had made this point so I looked). The car seems to have recovered itself, and the driver grabbed it a second later after it was already correcting.
That it decided it needed to turn all of a sudden us perplexing, and something that should be looked into, but it also went back to a straight path a moment later, either because of pedestrians too close or because of some other reason.
> nobody is arguing this error was so bad it could have killed civilians even if the driver was responsible.
"drove directly through where the people were going to be" most definitely implies that to my eyes. People die for exactly that reason all the time. Maybe I'm confused as to what you're trying to communicate.
> The driver took over way before the car entered the crosswalk section.
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> "Entered the crosswalk section" is a rather euphemistic way of describing "drove directly through where the people were going to be" reply
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"The driver took over way before the car drove directly through where the people were going to be."
If you are right that the car stopped itself then it's certainly not as large an error as I had assumed. I think what I was mainly trying to communicate was simply a disagreement with the person I was responding to who implied there was little wrong with this behaviour at all.
You are required, by law, to stop for pedestrians in crosswalks. Every intersection in Washington state is a crosswalk, marked or not.
But if you were an observer on the corner and could not see whether it was a human or an AI was driving the car, you would almost certainly consider whatever the car did (starting the turn) while pedestrians were actively crossing dangerous.