I think it’s absolutely fair to expect autonomous vehicles to have awareness of a probable side collision in an intersection and be able to speed up or slow down to avoid it.
I often see oncoming cars rushing to make a left turn past when their arrow has turned yellow and red, and so I know not to enter an intersection even though my light has turned green.
Autonomous systems in theory should be better than humans at this because they can track all surrounding objects and trajectories, not just ones they are looking at with one set of eyes.
I think the accident rate is kind of a meaningless stats. You can have a low accident rate by carefully controlling the conditions under which you test. Not many accidents means they aren’t pushing the envelope. That’s probably a good thing on public roads. It’s also why the system is not available for general public use except under extremely controlled routes and close (remote) supervision.
I think it’s great we have (at least) two mega-companies in a race trying different approaches to reach a solution. There are good points for and against both approaches. This is what makes life interesting, you can’t just run the numbers to predict the future.
Linking to an article about a waymo car being hit by a car in a side collision seems pretty disingenuous when comparing to the Tesla accidents that people usually talk about