Police release video of the fatal Uber self-driving car accident

A few days ago news broke out that there had been a fatal accident involving a pedestrian and a self-driving Uber car with a passenger inside.

I personally was not aware that Uber has already started autonomous driving but I was not surprised as I've heard much good about them and that the technology has progressed a lot in recent years. The google selfdriving project called Waymo had been tested for over 1 million miles in 2015 and according to wikipedia these were the reasons to its crashes:

In June 2015, Google founder Sergey Brin confirmed that there had been 12 collisions as of that date, eight of which involved being rear-ended at a stop sign or traffic light, two in which the vehicle was side-swiped by another driver, one of which involved another driver rolling through a stop sign, and one where a Google employee was manually driving the car.

As you can see not a single time was it the car or the technology that had malfunctioned or was to blame.

The recent collision awoke a lot of controversy and people wanting to abort the autonomous service of Uber but I am not so sure if this is the best way to go.

Tempe Police of Arizona where the fatal collision occurred released the dashcam of the accident today, here is a link to the source on Twitter
if you are too lazy and want to watch it in the post I re-uploaded the short video onto youtube, warning though as the content are moments into the collision.

A user named "Little_Froto" on Reddit did the math explaining that even with a human driver, in this situation they would've not been able to avoid the accident.

White center lines = 10' each

Empty space between lines = 30'
Distance traveled in FPS "Feet Per Second" at 35 MPH = 52.5'
Road gradient roughly 0%
Reaction distance = 34'
Breaking distance at 35 MPH - 62'
Stopping distance at 35 MPH - 100'
When the pedestrians shoes first become visible in the video there is approximately 59' between the car and the pedestrian, in 1 second the car will have already covered 52.5' of that gap leaving 6.5' left to stop the car.
In order for a human driver, or the driver in this car to have avoided this collision by merely hitting the brakes and traveling in a straight line, "as is the reaction when startled by something on the road" there would have needed to be at least another 127.5' of distance between the car and the pedestrian.
For all the posts and articles that I have seen bashing the driver and Uber because this could have been avoided, it really couldn't have, the laws of physics would not have even allowed this to have been avoided in the best possible scenario.

With this in mind I don't agree that we should stop autonomous driving because of these accidents. Who knows how many accidents have been avoided self-driving so far, cutting off the technology or saying that "it's not there yet" is not a good way forward in my opinion.

What are your views on this situation, Steemians?

---