I believe the normal behavior of self-driving cars in these situations is for the car to brake to avoid hitting the obstacle, so the safety driver has ample time to take over and navigate the situation. Didn’t Uber disable the auto-braking because it was oversensitive, choosing not to pause road tests until that issue was fixed?
Uber disabled the OEM (Volvo) auto-braking but not the Uber braking algorithms. IMO, that’s largely a red herring as they could have equally well chosen to base their platform on a car that didn’t originally have a factory auto-braking system.
