Yeah it's all good intentions and PR talk until you see how the lawyers respond after an incident. IMHO Uber incident shows that it is extremely unlikely for any human to face criminal charges after a deadly incident with self driving car.
Uber was still reachable by authorities, and did show up in court.
All I am saying is that self-driving companies aren't going to pull off a hit-and-run and dodge the fact that an accident did happen. So one doesn't really need to worry about how a self-driving car deals with the note-on-windshield part. More than likely their HQ would be aware of the accident remotely and have legal responsibility to call 911 immediately if necessary. And in the event that a car's algorithm pulled off a hit-and-run on minor property damage, the company would still be easily reachable by authorities and respond to a court summons.
That's kinda unfair though. She was jaywalking in the dark far from any crosswalk on a main street. On average 16 pedestrians are killed every day in the United States. While the car could have done better, it's not really clear that she would have survived if the car was driven by a human.
> Further, the report says that as long as Vasquez met the minimum visual acuity for a driver's license under Arizona law, and with the lighting conditions at the scene, she "could have seen and recognized that a person was walking across the road from a distance of 1700 feet away with or without the Volvo’s headlights."
As long as we're correcting this story, note also that "far from any crosswalk" is also completely bogus. The place where the woman was trying to cross is where a paved path leads from a beach, and then just suddenly ends at this road. The only reason it was illegal to cross the road here is because they put up a sign. In the absence of the sign, every architectural feature of this landscape would lead a reasonable person to believe they could be here.
Arizona has quite a few of these no pedestrian crossing signs, combined with the extreme length between intersections/legal crosswalks, it is very hostile to humans.
It's pretty abhorrent that jaywalking is even considered a factor in the eyes of the law. What if you were senile or a child or blind or mentally unwell or intoxicated or running on little sleep, and just took a stumble onto the road? Suddenly your slaughter doesn't matter because you weren't walking on some white paint at the time? I think this needs to be changed.