Turning one system off in favor of another is basically admitting that they have no faith in their software. Also isn't driving a car with sensors (without self-driving tech) basically a giant data collector? The mere act of driving a car (with a human brain) should help a SDV system understand a false-positive and a false negative simply by learning what a human does in contrast to what the machine thinks it is supposed to do.
I imagine this is what separates Waymo and the others. I feel like Waymo is using math/neural nets, etc.. whereas Tesla and Uber were probably giant hand-written if/else machines. I have nothing to back that up, except that that's kinda what this article is about.
Speaking for Tesla and Uber, they use neural nets. Tesla has the most data which is what you're referring to above and they do exactly what you were stating. The software is/has always been shadowing human drivers, that is learning and comparing to the decisions it would make on its own. Uber is also most definitely using a similar set up. I think neural nets are a basic necessity in this field since there are an almost infinite number of scenarios.
I imagine this is what separates Waymo and the others. I feel like Waymo is using math/neural nets, etc.. whereas Tesla and Uber were probably giant hand-written if/else machines. I have nothing to back that up, except that that's kinda what this article is about.