I read several. He did not say that. He said he observed the lady finish walking her bike across the street, which is common in Tempe with the excessively long blocks. He said the car did not slow down or break. He did NOT say there was no time to. There are various reports about this. If they saw, then there was time. The computer failed, the operator in the car failed. We might allow the latter, but the former? Besides, combine that with Uber’s problem with bicycles and bike paths, this deserves careful investigation, not rash rush to cover up the first murder by a self-driving car.
“The driver said it was like a flash, the person walked out in front of them,” said Sylvia Moir, police chief in Tempe, Ariz., the location for the first pedestrian fatality involving a self-driving car. “His first alert to the collision was the sound of the collision.”
From viewing the videos, “it’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway,” Moir said.
“I suspect preliminarily it appears that the Uber would likely not be at fault in this accident, either,” Moir said.