Yeah but the focus will be on the driverless car, I’m not saying they are blameless, just that the general heat and attention will probably not be on them now
Autonomous vehicles are still mostly half baked, and the question of liability of who gets the blame hasn’t even preheated the oven.
The reality is company’s like waymo are using their cars in SF precisely to harvest training data because they can’t finish it without real world data- the physical driving a car is easy; interacting with humans is not.
One of my son’s coworkers was just killed in a similar incident. Woman hits a pedestrian, she freaks out and calls her boyfriend instead of emergency services, boyfriend arrives and runs over the injured pedestrian ensuring he was dead.
They are unsure which vehicle actually killed him.
The general public is irrelevant here. If it weren't for the self driving car the hit and run wouldn't even have made the news. If it all this makes it worse for the driver.
And I don't think there is a wrong party to blame. Both are equally fucked up.
Perhaps he's implying that due to the second car it may obfuscate if the first driver's actions would have been lethal or just left the person injured. He'd probably rather be tried for a hit and run resulting in injury than a hit and run resulting in a death.