It was pretty predictable this would happen, there are even videos on youtube where other drivers dashcams have caught Uber driverless cars going through red lights while they are waiting at the red light.
https://youtu.be/pzzQ42D9Srw
[youtube]pzzQ42D9Srw[/youtube]
The main reason this person is dead is due to corporate greed. It's as simple as that.
Uber is losing billions of dollars every year.
Uber's loss jumped 61 percent to $4.5 billion in 2017
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/13/ubers-loss-jumped-61-percent-to-4-point-5-billion-in-2017.html
Uber is desperately trying to find a way to make its business profitable instead of losing money and the best way to do that is to make human drivers redundant as paying drivers expensive.
The funny thing is most people expect when driverless cars take over that prices will go down but the fact is if Uber is in a 10billion plus loss hole their whole plan is to hope if anything people are willing to pay the same amount or even a premium over normal taxies for at least 10 years. They probably hoping their biggest market will be women who are afraid of getting into taxis with dodgy male drivers etc.
Uber even originally refused to obtain a self-driving car permit when it first started.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/03/uber-rethinks-defiance-will-apply-for-self-driving-car-permit-in-california/
I tell you every time I get on my bike and go out there I have had this fear on the back of my mind, would I rather be killed by a stupid driver or killed by someone else's simple greed? The upside that comes to mind is I know with human drivers is they are much more likely to be properly punished than a reckless CEO. I hope Uber gets punished, I hope people understand this is a death from the result of greed. Elon Musk and his self-driving cars are the same, its all about pushing that stock price up.
This is just a race to push up vehicle stock prices, make no mistake about it.
I think a hybrid of human+driver sensor technology is the best way to go.
https://www.honda.com.au/about/safety/honda-sensing.html
I think this will be great as its basically making dangerous driving a thing of the past. All the built-in sensors make it difficult to impossible to run over or run into anything with collision detection technologies or verge into other lanes. I think the final "driver-assist" technology should be one that restricts drivers going faster than legally possible which really should be a no-brainer, if not first implemented technology.
To me, there is no logical way a perfect hybridization of these driverless sensor technologies makes a fully driverless car any safer than one with a human-driver, in other words, with this tech the human can only make it safer.
In the short term-future I think drivers will be more of an instant guide to where the car is going rather than specific detail but one still with instant breaking, steering wheel etc..
I think these hybrid driver-assist technologies coming to market will ruin the argument that the only safe car is a driverless one, because if the sensors are working properly the human driver only becomes an extra asset sensor on top.
One of the main reasons I am a fan of advanced hybrid of human+driver sensor technology is due to the fact it takes the extreme greed race out of it all, as getting rid of human drivers doesn't become the top priority and only the safety becomes the top priority.
Uber being a billion dollar company (about 60billion dollar private market cap), the only way the CEO keeps his job is by spending 10s of millions of dollars on lawyers and publicists coming up with the best way to word up statements and press to make it look like it was everyone else's fault but their own.