Good thing it has some good amou of context. But I feel like this kind of incident can only be better analyzed with images and simulations of what happened.
According to reports, the pedestrian was illegally crossing the road at a traffic light with a red light for the pedestrians and a green light for the cars.
The human driven car presumably didn't see the pedestrian and hit her at high speed, she then bounced into the path of the autonomous car. The autonomous car, which was empty, slammed on the brakes but could not stop in time.
Would a human have stopped in time? That would depend on the human...
Do you think it would have been better to continue driving over someone? What would you like the car to do after a person is thrown under it? Hover mode?
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Going "I just hit someone, I'm going to shut down everything and wait for people to come solve this" is a better general approach than "I just hit someone, better back up to make sure I'm not parked right on top of them." That second approach could lead to the vehicle dragging the victim, driving over them a second time, or otherwise making things much worse.
It's not like the car can't be controlled, if driving off was deemed the correct action, they could have gotten them to over-ride and drive the car off. Driving off is almost never the recommended action in these cases.
Once it's already parked on the leg, sure. But during the accident continuing on in the initial impact to go over the leg (hopefully with just the front tire. Would've been preferable. But also that's a very weird edge case that i imagine there were no sensors for, and a human could've made the exact same mistake in trying to brake before hand but not quite making it and inadvertently parking on the victim instead.
Would a human have stopped in time? That would depend on the human…
Unlikely. These SDCs have reaction speeds far faster than any human driver. The biggest issue here is just simple physics; trying to stop a car that's already at speed requires a certain amount of distance, and from what I'm understanding, it's sounding like avoiding hitting the woman was literally impossible in this scenario (short of delaying the initial takeoff, which - in traffic - is a safety hazard in and of itself).