This has been mentioned a lot of times lately (the auto-braking). When you think about it, you realize there are a million moments during normal driving where you have an obstacle ahead. Other cars, lane dividers like these that you might _have_ to pass by closely, or at least will have your car pointed at it for a few seconds, making tight curves on a walled road, high curbs, buildings that are on the edge of the road, etc. It's not that simple, and I bet a lot of this is already taken into account by the software.
My understanding is that auto-braking during autonomous driving doesn’t normally react to stationary objects like barriers. Otherwise it would brake for things like cardboard boxes, plastic bags, and other debris that often makes its way onto the road. But rather, autonomous driving AI puts a lot of trust into its lane guidance.
In what world would you not want your car to brake for a cardboard box? You don’t know what is inside. It could be empty, or could be full of nails. Or a cat.
Regardless, it should be trivial have a different behavior for a moving object that enters the road versus a rigid object that has not been observed moving.
Sometimes it's just a piece of paper or something similarly harmless that happens to be positioned on the road in such a way that it appears to be an obstacle.
If a system can't reliably differentiate between a flat object lying on the road, an object fluttering rapidly in the air, and a stationary object that is protruding from the road, it has no right to be in control of a car.
