These autonomous systems are evaluating surrounding vectors every few milliseconds. A timescale of 3 seconds simply isn't important, as they would instantly detect you slowing down and conclude that you wouldn't intersect with their vector.

> But why didn't it brake from t minus 6 to t minus 1.3? Looks like it detected that the car's and object's paths were converging, so why didn't it brake during that interval?

Safe driving often does require slowing down in the face of insufficient information. If a human driver sees an inattentive pedestrian about to intersect traffic, they will slow down. “Drive until collision is unavoidable” is a failing strategy.

And anyway, jerky driving is a symptom of late braking, not early braking.

I see it as more than just jerkyness, I see a massive safety issue in traffic. If your autonomous car is slamming on the brakes spontaneously there's a lot more opportunities for other drivers to plow into you from behind.

No it's not, the issue was jerky driving.

> “Drive until collision is unavoidable” is a failing strategy.

No kidding.

That being said, I'm happy to find my assumptions about stopping time are incorrect and a car traveling at 25mph can stop in less than a second. So on busy NYC streets this wouldn't be an issue. Even at 50mph it appears that stopping time is sub 3s, so the vehicle could probably have avoided this collision if it were running a more intelligent program.

Right, collision is basic physics accounting for the stopping time and distance of pedestrians and cars. So the question is whether pedestrians on sidewalks really have so many collision vectors with traffic such that autonomous vehicles would be jerky all of the time as the initial poster suggested.

I claim reasonable defaults that would far outperform humans on average wouldn't have that property. Autonomous vehicles should be programmed to follow the rules of the road with reasonable provisions to avoid collisions when possible.