I don't need to believe there was a conspiracy to protect Uber here. This spot apparently has a history of pedestrian crossing, and many police departments have a habit of assigning all blame to the pedestrian in a pedestrian/vehicle collision. This blame is reinforced by the driver's "evidence" (driver didn't see anything, but she wasn't looking) and the dashcam (can't see anything, but the quality is atrocious and not at all reflective of what most drivers would see).
One thing we should take away from this incident is that we need to seriously push back on immediate "pedestrian's fault" rulings when police make them after a pedestrian/vehicle collision. It was readily apparent within hours that the story didn't add up, but people only paid so much attention because it's the first such crash involving an autonomous vehicle.
The more interesting question is how that shockingly poor dashcam footage came to be. That quality is so poor that I find it hard to believe that Uber is actively using it as a sensor input. Hell, it's worse than most dashcams I've seen on Youtube...
One thing we should take away from this incident is that we need to seriously push back on immediate "pedestrian's fault" rulings when police make them after a pedestrian/vehicle collision. It was readily apparent within hours that the story didn't add up, but people only paid so much attention because it's the first such crash involving an autonomous vehicle.
The more interesting question is how that shockingly poor dashcam footage came to be. That quality is so poor that I find it hard to believe that Uber is actively using it as a sensor input. Hell, it's worse than most dashcams I've seen on Youtube...