Buried deep in one article it seems that despite there being some evidence the safety driver was looking at their phone, they decided that the driver wouldn't have had time to stop anyway.

Why are the cars even at the roads when it was fairly clear this could happen?

Because it's no more risk than just driving a regular car on the road? Uber employs/contracts thousands of regular people to drive customers around and I'm sure some of them have had accidents as well - they just don't make the news as much.

There is this secondary issue that partially autonomous cars give the driver a false sense of safety but that's not unique to this case either.

~6 seconds is quite a long stop distance when decelerating from 40 mph. Wonder what the visibility was. Not sure how valid "ya they were looking away but they wouldn't have seen them anyway" is.

Kind of depressing to think about: They hired a safety driver, then engineered the system so the safety driver was not capable of preventing the accident. Just paying a human to sit in the seat and watch the car kill a pedestrian. Even if it's not the driver's fault, they're probably going to feel guilt about their involvement forever. I sure would. All because some engineers cut corners!

> engineered the system so the safety driver was not capable of preventing the accident.

I don't believe this is true, unless I misread the article. The safety driver can override the vehicle controls at any point, and had she been paying attention to the road, would have done so five seconds earlier.