Those damn things are not ready to be used on public roads. Allowing them is one of the more prominent examples of corruption that we’ve seen recently.
I believe from what I read is that some of these driverless car companies in the US are releasing their fleet, flooding the street 24/7. Some of them will take up parking places, cause traffic jam, or just stall in the middle of the road.
Maybe it's different in the Europe, where there's stricter regulation, since from the comments here, many who are okay with driverless car are mostly from European countries. Unless if you own stock in those companies, then there's incentive caused bias.
Just like how drugs need to go on multiple clinical trials before going on the mass market, I believe that if you want driverless vehicles, a lot of testing is needed.
The main rationale of these companies is not to bring a safer environment with driverless cars, the main rationale is how to get rid of gig workers that causes problems to Uber or Lyft, problems such as demanding living wage, proper employment status, unions, etc.
When these things were originally being tested, at least the Waymo ones I'm familiar with, there was a driver who could manually override in case of issues. Honestly, if these things still have issues with emergency situations (and other unexpected situations), they absolutely still need a driver with the ability to manually override the car. That way, they can still test the self-driving function while being able to actually maneuver the car out of the way of things like this.
Two autonomous Cruise vehicles and an empty San Francisco police vehicle were blocking the only exits from the scene, according to one of the reports, forcing the ambulance to wait while first responders attempted to manually move the Cruise vehicles or** locate an officer who could move the police car**.
So, in conjunction with a cop car, the road was blocked. I'd love to see an actual picture or diagram of the blockage.
Obviously it is a sad story for the deceased and it's family but according to the cruise spoke person there was supposed to be enough space so the emergency car could pass.
And later the article mentioned there were 55 more situations where these cars caused problems.
Well there are car accidents everywhere in the word every day because of careless drivers so this is kinda common.
So I really don't think banning these cars should be an answer, but to keep improving them.