Do we know the vehicle didn't brake? There's no audio to tell us anything, and a car takes "almost a second" to rock forward on its suspension when reacting to brake input too. FWIW, I think I might see the nose bobbing a bit just before the collision, but honestly can't tell.
I certainly don't think you can say "did not attempt to brake" based on the evidence at hand, basically.
Because the nose of the car doesn't go down. Especially in an emergency braking situation the nose of the car will go significantly down, and you would see that in the video.
The video is cut as the person is a few feet from being struck by the car. That's not "the last second" that's basically at the point of impact and already much too late
Indeed. Uber was clearly able to spin the early reports about this incident; there is little correspondence between those descriptions and this video. Corruption in Tempe.
The victim had absolutely no business crossing that road like that, but the notion that the fatality was somehow unavoidable is pure bunk.
Individual actors all working within the same values system and responding to the same inputs will produce similar actions. There's no conspiracy or "quid pro quo" corruption here, most likely, merely a corrupt values system. In a place like tempe pedestrians and bicyclists are treated as second class citizens, especially in the case of crashes involving automobiles. In this particular case there is a walkway on the median strip which is purely decorative and marked with signs indicating not to use it, which should tell you how pedestrian hostile the area is.
I certainly don't think you can say "did not attempt to brake" based on the evidence at hand, basically.