[mannykannot]

This argument frustrates me more than somewhat, especially if it is what Uber's engineers were thinking when they removed the last safeguard that could have avoided this fatal accident.

There is a reason for there being such a thing as a crash-test dummy, and for crash tests being done in elaborate facilities that simulate crashes. It is because testing how a vehicle handles a crash in live (literally) situations is both ineffective and unethical.

The purpose of the system under test is to drive safely. If the simple safety override was triggered, then that was probably a failure of the autonomous driving system. Any case where it was not could be identified afterwards, by analysis.

Furthermore, when you have a complex system controlling potentially dangerous machinery, it is a sound engineering principle to include simple 'censors' to catch the rare corner cases that are a feature of complex systems, no matter how carefully designed and thoroughly tested. Nuclear systems have a number of independent safety systems that can scram the reactor, each in response to a single specific condition. Disabling them for a test is what happened at Chernobyl.