I disagree, if you look at any of the Waymo videos you can see they have great recognition of every car, pedestrian, and obstacle within 100 meters of the car, and most of that data (point cloud lidar/radar at the very least) would work in pitch black without even headlights. Thus it's extremely reasonable to expect that autonomous vehicles will easily prevent scenarios like this.

Inclement conditions, defensive driving, etc. are much harder to work with but this should have been cake.

If you turn your headlights off on a dark country road, your sight capabilities actually go up, not down. The problem is: most roads are lit or you st least have to compete with other headlights, and it would make you harder to see.

There was also a recent lawsuit where Uber pledged to not use any lidar tech and software from Waymo anymore. Maybe they had to deactivate Lidar.

LIDAR in question on this vehicle is an HDL-64, a commercial unit from Velodyne. Lawsuit is entirely unrelated.

If you look at any demo video from the manufacturer, the product is always perfect and amazing.

Go to [0] and [1] and count how many times they use the word "safe." We're not hoping autonomous vehicles are safer, we're being sold on them as the safer alternative. So yes, this type of close call situation is exactly where these vehicles are supposed to be superior.

[0] https://waymo.com/

[1] https://www.uber.com/info/atg/

Why should I take their marketing at face value?

Of course they are selling them as safe. I still think the funding to work on them is chasing big piles of money.

Human-driven car fatalities per day: 120+

Automated-car fatalities total: 1

Seems safer, so far.

Also, nothing's going to make walking out in front of a ton of steel going 30+mph 100% safe.

That's a very misleading comparison, even as an informal, rough comparison for the sake of argument.

Such a comparison would have to take into account the amount of human-driven cars and automated cars - not just taking a picture of a single day, but the variance over time (e.g. if today there are a thousand automated cars in operation, and yesterday there were 50, that can distort the average stats); automated cars aren't driving in certain areas/times/weather conditions whereas human-driven cars are, etc.

Automated cars may be safer, but, open snark – I hope it's not calculating its sensor data in this way — close snark.

This isn't the first automated car fatality though right? Hasn't Tesla had some?

Maybe a better word than "intended" would be "expected". As in, most normal, rational, reasonable people basically familiar with the technology involved expect this to be preventable.

Being buried in lawsuits isn't a great way to make money, generally speaking. The people hoping to make lots of money at this should have a pretty high level of motivation to make it safe.