That being said, I’m a huge skeptic of the current state of self driving cars. I would have assumed these systems use LIDAR as well as vision and could have at least slammed on the brakes.
A vehicle traveling 43 mph (69 km/h) can generally stop within 89 feet (27 m) once the brakes are applied.
The police explanation of Herzberg's path meant she had already crossed two lanes of traffic before she was struck by the autonomous vehicle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg
I was also misled by the poorly exposed "official" video. Given the numbers above there was time for a human driver to see her and even come to a complete stop. Further since she was moving from one side of the road to the other and only entered directly into the vehicle's path in the last 1.3 seconds (image in "Software issues" section of wikipedia article) it is likely that all that would have been needed to avoid the collision would have been a minor slow down and she would have completed her crossing safely.
But then I went into consulting and saw that big companies have teams of lawyers that settle proactively out of court to keep inconvenient truths out of the public opinion.
Like the first few exploding iPhones.
(Just an example, never worked there)
BTW, did you hear about the Uber crash where their AI couldn't track a pedestrian and then killed her?