You are probably overestimating the jerk from that. 5mph has (1/12)^2 = 1/144th the energy of 60mph. Passengers often don't pay attention to what's going on and breaking force is generally not enough to really mess with people.

That said, the default is not going to be stopping within 1-2 inches of pedestrians, rather it's going to gradually slow down to deal with pedestrians while trying to maintain forward progress. The point is a self driving car could be more aggressive than most people while staying safe instead of freaking out and just stopping because people are jaywalking.

You're right of course. It's hard to imagine any useful vehicle spending much of its time moving at only 5 mph, though, so I suppose I'm really imagining what such a stop would be like from a more normal travel speed like 20-25 mph.

I am picturing this more as an extreme edge case than anything else. If a person can safely do 20-25mph in an area then a self-driving car should be able to do the same thing.

It's the edge case where a car needs to cross a really high traffic area that's going to be an issue and people can't do 20mph right in front of a high traffic box store entrance etc. Further, going slow for a few hundred feet really does not take that long.

I would VASTLY prefer to be in that car than to be in a different car with a human driver and watch a person get killed by the vehicle I'm riding in.

Nobody is going to die from a 5 mph collision. It's not even likely to break any bones. At 30 mph, the chance of death is still only 5%!

There may still be reasons to prefer robot cars for low-speed environments but the probability of such a vehicle striking and killing a pedestrian is already very low, so that is not relevant to a discussion of a robot car's ability to stop very rapidly at very low speeds.

http://www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/research/pub/HS809012.htm...