Pathetic and sad performance by the vehicle and "safety" driver. The woman does not "appear out of nowhere", she was in the roadway for some time. The woman was not wearing all black, had red hair, and her shoes were reflective. Even if we are to believe that their camera is this crappy, they still have the lidar, and it appears brakes were not applied. Even 500ms of braking * 0.8g = 9mph. That might have saved her l…
What I don't understand is why the pedestrian didn't see or hear the car. She seems totally oblivious. Surely she would have seen the headlights. It is possible she had some sensory impairment, either visual or auditory.
Cars are highly visible to pedestrians (due to headlights). I think pedestrians assume that they themselves are equally as visible to the car driver too - "I can see them, so they must be able to see me." is the subconscious line of thought I think.
Often though pedestrians get "lost" in the lights of oncoming vehicles or the brake lights of cars ahead, or are just in your blind spots.
The other thing is, I've noticed that people who have never learnt to drive often don't really appreciate how cars act and are not very good at estimating the distances involved. You've probably noticed this when crossing streets - some people take some eye-raising risks when crossing the road while others wait ... guess which ones are the drivers who are experienced with how cars/drivers act!
My guess here is the poor woman was stationary in the median thinking "Should I cross?" as the car was approaching. She probably then decided she had time to make it across before the Uber car got there so started to cross the street, perhaps assuming the vehicle was further away than it was, or would slow down since the "driver" would see her. We've all done this I am sure ... sometimes with time to spare, sometimes cutting it a bit close.
Perhaps if this was what happened, the Uber car "saw" her stationary in the median and disregarded her as a stationary road-side object and carried on until it was too late. IIRC these systems need to disregard static objects at the side of the road (e.g. signs, trees etc) otherwise they'd be slamming the brakes on all the time. Perhaps the initial movement she made into the road was disregarded as "sensor noise" (e.g. you can see objects "jumping around" a bit in this video from Uber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCkkhlxYNwE) from what it thought was a static object, but that would not explain the apparent total non-reaction from the vehicle when she was clearly in the path.
I've driven a XC90 a few times - it has auto-lane keeping when using cruise control on the highway. Perhaps that was what was driving, not the Uber system.
Tragic stuff regardless of what happened.