This is so tragic. Even Volvo's own collision avoidance system would (could?) have mitigated the crash a fair bit. From Volvo's own spec. sheet [1]: "For speeds between 45 and 70 km/h, the collision is mitigated." In this case, the NTSB reports mentions that the car was traveling at 43mph, i.e. 68.8 kmph :(.
What bothers me is that these systems are on public roads, without public oversight. Sure, Uber got permission from the local authorities, but getting an independent team of technologists and ethicists to sign off on the basic parameters should have been the bare minimum ... yes, that would take time, but do we really want to give companies, especially ones like Uber with a history of ethical transgressions, the benefit of the doubt?
[1] https://tinyurl.com/y9sp2fmu (WARNING: This open/downloads a PDF that I referred to above. Page 5 has the paragraph on pedestrian collision detection specs)
If you want to compare it with a car operating on cruise control you'd have to sedate the driver.
(Subaru's doesn't do active lanekeeping, but lots of other manufacturers like BMW and Ford do.)
The newer cruise controls have lane-keep assist and adaptive cruise control - you don't have to actively steer or brake. On an open road, there's effectively little difference from the Uber vehicle, which would also let you disengage autonomous mode by breaking or otherwise interacting with the controls. (The newest mass-market cruise controls are "stop and go", which means they'll even bring the car to a full stop, then start driving again.)
Or at least it should be. That's why there is a v_max that a car is not allowed to exceed and a faster or heavier car will have better breaks. And 70 km/h as here should be far away from v_max.
I hope that whoever was responsible for this piece of crap software loses a lot of sleep over it, and that Uber will admit that they have no business building safety critical software. Idiots.
For 6 seconds the system had crucial information and failed to relay it, for 1.3 seconds the system knew an accident was going to happen and failed to act on that knowledge.
Drunk drivers suck, but this is much worse. This is the equivalent of plowing into a pedestrian with a vehicle while you're in full control of it because you are afraid that your perception of the world is so crappy that you will over-react to such situations often enough that the risk of killing someone you know is there is perceived as the lower one.
Not to mention all the errors in terms of process and oversight that allowed this p.o.s. software to be deployed in traffic.