I think it's very clear that a human driving a normal vehicle is different from a human sitting at the wheel of a self-driving (semi-self-driving?) vehicle. You simply cannot expect a human to remain as engaged and attentive in such a passive situation.
It's baffling to me that they chose to deactivate emergency braking without substituting a driver alert. If the false-positives are so frequent as to render the alert useless (i.e. it's going off all the time and you ignore it) I don't think these vehicles are suitable for on-road testing.
You can lean fairly heavily on the 'still dangerous, but better' argument in the face of 40,000 US vehicle fatalities each year, but there are limits.
I think it's very clear that a human driving a normal vehicle is different from a human sitting at the wheel of a self-driving (semi-self-driving?) vehicle. You simply cannot expect a human to remain as engaged and attentive in such a passive situation.
It's baffling to me that they chose to deactivate emergency braking without substituting a driver alert. If the false-positives are so frequent as to render the alert useless (i.e. it's going off all the time and you ignore it) I don't think these vehicles are suitable for on-road testing.
You can lean fairly heavily on the 'still dangerous, but better' argument in the face of 40,000 US vehicle fatalities each year, but there are limits.