It strikes me that a good way to test self driving cars would be to simulate people doing random dangerous things like walking in front of the car and seeing ho

It strikes me that a good way to test self driving cars would be to simulate people doing random dangerous things like walking in front of the car and seeing how good the car is at avoiding an accident. Then you give the car less and less time to see how well it can eg. respond to a giant mannequin being thrown in front of it. Following that train of thought, an accident like this could have been caused by fear of corporate liability. Because you would eventually have to set some threshold where the car would not respond to an errant pedestrian for the safety of the occupants. Especially in wet weather. A good lawyer could argue that is when the car software decided to kill the pedestrian. So, Uber's AV team might have just said "she was jaywalking" to avoid writing code that dealt with situations outside of the rules of the road because it might in the future look controversial, even if the addition of that code may have the effect of sparing more lives than it takes.