[kaennar]

Anything that is tracking an object moving on the road should be looking at the velocity of the scanned object as well as keeping track of some sort of difference from normal. I would think the car should know it's on a two lane one way road, realized an object was moving in one lane with some sort of velocity towards the path of the vehicle, and that perhaps something was not normal.

From the reports of cars running red lights and then this I would imagine they have an extremely high level of "risk" (what it takes for the car to take actions in order to avoid something/stop) that is acceptable.

What would be far worse than a hardware or sensor failure would be to learn that Uber is instead teaching its cabs to fly through the streets with abandon. Instead of having cars that drive like a nice, thoughtful citizen we'll have a bunch of vehicles zooming through the streets like a pissed of cabby in Russia.