They would have a hard time testing their cars like this a lot of other places. No wonder they picked Arizona. Around here (I'm in Scandinavia) if a car hits something other than another car it is always the drivers fault, jaywalking pedestrians or not. It is the responsibility of car drivers not to hit softer things - full stop.
This and traffic in Paris are the real tests of self driving cars.
Yeah, same in the Netherlands, the car driver is at best 50% at fault, typically 100%.
I do want to see self driving cars in Amsterdam though, I think they'd just shut down and have a sob after not being able to move due to being swarmed with bikes well within any sort of safety area.
There was a recent video by a Waymo person who dealt with understanding the world. He went into great detail about how to observe things. One thing he mentioned is that the car also has the goal of getting to the destination. There was an example of a pretty packed school area. The safest thing to do might be to completely stop. The car however slowed down and tried to make its intentions clear. Unfortunately I cannot find the video.. it also went into detail of how to spot that something unexpected might happen.
> It is the responsibility of car drivers not to hit softer things - full stop.
I get the feeling a lot of people on HN have never actually driven a vehicle or at least haven't in recent memory. If you're driving through a street at a perfectly safe and reasonable speed a sufficiently stupid pedestrian is still perfectly capable of creating a situation that causes you to hit them. Nothing is foolproof. I'm sure I could get a truck driver who's doing nothing wrong to back over me if I behaved ignorantly enough.
Absolutes like "always the driver's faults are just stupid, ignorant, poorly thought out, whatever you want to call it but they sure aren't good.
It is every road user's ultimate responsibility to behave in a manner such that nobody else is forced to take emergency action to avoid them. The reason we have specific rules is so that people behave predictably (e.g. stopping at stop signs) making this easier.
I say this as someone who walks a couple miles through the city every day.
In countries like China where the driver has more fault than a pedestrian and many aren’t following the rules (drivers and pedestrians), what winds up happening is that overall cruise speeds are greatly reduced and everyone is constantly on edge. I joke that the cars never really stop for you but everyone just slowly swerved out of each other’s way.
This and traffic in Paris are the real tests of self driving cars.