My thoughts go out to her family. And the many many people who die every day because of reckless drivers and accidents. Driverless or not. Really sucks to lose someone due to no fault of their own (other than being there).
To add, driverless or not, most who kill others using a car are not criminally liable. Often times not even liable beyond what the state minimum is. Unless the victim sues for personal assets. So in California, that's 100k. Which is one of the lowest in the USA.
I don't like that you are equating this with any other car accident.
Uber made a vehicle that can zoom around the roads unassisted. You can't just put something like that out there and disclaim responsibility by assuming that somebody will sit and be ready to brake at the right times. Even trains have a 'dead man's switch', where the train stops if the operator is unresponsive.
What they did was incredibly irresponsible, they have been running an experiment on public roads with the lives of the general public at stake. For this they need to be held responsible.
You have a reasonable point that the victim probably bears some responsibility for crossing in the middle of a block in the dark, but I'm pretty sure that it was a divided city street with a 35 MPH speed limit rather than what is typically thought of as an expressway: "the preliminary police investigation determined that the car was speeding—going 38 mph in a 35 mph zone when the crash occurred" (https://www.curbed.com/transportation/2018/3/20/17142090/ube...).
It was a well lit section of road (the dashcam video Uber released makes it look much darker than it really is, there is other video out there of the same section of road, you can find it on youtube) and it was a natural crossing point but a very poorly designed road/walk way. Almost any human driver who was paying attention would have spotted her from a big distance and avoided hitting her.
To add, driverless or not, most who kill others using a car are not criminally liable. Often times not even liable beyond what the state minimum is. Unless the victim sues for personal assets. So in California, that's 100k. Which is one of the lowest in the USA.