If they still had loads of false object detections, enabling it may have caused loads of rear end collisions as well.
This. Not only do pedestrians need to be predictable, but EVERYTHING needs to be predictable to eliminate collisions. Unless you make the environment 100% predictable there are going to be collisions. FACT. This means making it impossible for a person (or anything else) to break the rules and be where they're not expected to be (ie wandering around in the street). Unless we are ready to make sealed "roadway tubes" or something then this isn't a reality. Expect ANY type of vehicle, autonomous or not, to hit things that break the rules.
I stand by what I said last time, which is that there is no way to make anything 100% safe and so you should stop expecting perfection. Even if you make cars that won't EVER go over 5mph in the name of safety, that's still not slow enough to react to EVERY situation. 44mph collisions will routinely kill people. 20mph collisions will routinely kill people. 10mph collisions will routinely kill people. People moving at 0mph tipping over on their bicycles routinely get concussions if they hit their heads without a helmet and some actually do die. We did not evolve to be hit by metal objects weighing 4000+lbs moving at any speed, but having those objects around is not something that's ever going away so we better get used to the consequences and respect the rules that reduce the likelihood of collisions.
Thinking in this case that a "beeping" sound to alert the driver would have helped is insane. As a driver, unless you are already focused on the act of driving, responding to an alert after being in the middle of another task is going to take seconds not ms to evaluate the situation and take an action. This is why reading text messages is so damn dangerous in a car. People can't context switch quickly. Stop reacting to this situation with your gut emotional respose and start thinking critically like engineers.
One thing I didn't see was clear, but I also didn't carefully read everything. When they say "emergency braking system" are they referring to the factory system built into the Volvo or are they talking about an add-on system that the Uber people installed as part of their autonomous package?
And again.... The measure of autonomous cars is NOT that they NEVER kill people. It's if they kill fewer people than non-autonomous cars do. If that's the case then it's worth having autonomous cars even without 100% perfectly perfect perfection.