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The incident highlights the chief flaw of self-driving cars: A weakness at reacting to unpredictable human actions.

“People do unpredictable things. You can run into all kinds of scenarios,” Ken Washington, the Ford Motor Company’s vice president of research and advanced engineering, told Wired in 2016.

Still, there is no shortage of expert claims that roads filled with autonomous vehicles will almost certainly be safer.

More than 30,000 Americans are killed every year in road crashes, including nearly 6,000 pedestrians. On average, this means that 64 American pedestrians have already been killed by cars in the days since the Sunday Uber crash.

Road crashes also kill more than 2,000 every year in Canada.

According to U.S. statistics, more than 94 per cent of all road collisions are due to human error.

Photo by AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File

“If we wait for perfect (autonomous vehicles), we’ll be waiting for a very, very long time. How many lives might we be losing if we wait?” Mark Rosekind, then chief regulator of the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration,said in 2016.

However, critics have pointed out that there might be a whole unseen category of crashes that are easily prevented by humans but evade the notice of autonomous systems.

The respective crash rates of autonomous vehicles “can only be determined by also knowing how many non-collisions happen,” wrote human factors researcher Peter Hancock in a February essay.

Photo by AFP PHOTO / Angelo Merendino

Sunday’s crash is the first pedestrian fatality involving a self-driving car, but it is not the first fatality overall. That occurred in 2016 when Ohio man Joshua Brown was killed when his Tesla Model S slammed into a blueberry truck.