Your idea sound great on first glance, but less so on second.
" If there is no safe escape route, it should not be moving"
This would not work, for the simple reason that there is no way to safely move on most roads, if you assume that everyone else is a malevolent actor, waiting to slam into you as soon as you place yourself in a position from which you cannot avoid him.
We all try not to get into situations where someone else's mistake will doom us. But we assume that most people are sane and will try to avoid accidents. Sometimes, we see that a particular car behaves dangerously, and we start planning our moves with the assumption that this particular actor may create problems. You cannot do that for everyone, or you will be paralyzed.
An automated car will assume that the car driving in the opposite direction on that two lane road will NOT swerve at the precise wrong moment when collision will be unavoidable. And most times, it will be a good assumptions, especially if the other car is also automated, and in good working order.
But some times, the other car will blow a left tire, or the other driver will have a heart attack and lean on the wheel. And an accident will be about to happen.
At this point, the automated car will have to do something. It will have very little time to react - more than a human, maybe, but it will have a lot less information.
I know that the huge object at the corner of my exit is an inflatable truck advertising for the Ford dealership, and that it is sitting on flimsy tubing frame covered with a plastic shroud. My automated car would not know that, and for it, it will be just an immobile object that it has to avoid.
With an automated car, all objects would be of three types - immobile objects, moving objects controlled by an known automated driver, all other moving objects. (It would be nice to have a category "Safe to hit", but there would be one in the foreseeable future, unless it is mandated by law that things get labeled that way)
When a collision is imminent, the car should try to avoid hitting anything. If it cannot, it will have a fail mode, which I bet dollars to donuts will be "Maintain heading and reduce speed". Why? Because that is the safest setting in many situations, because it is what you want everyone else to do, and because it is easy to mandate it by law. Car manufacturers and insurance companies will both want it, and guess what? They are the one who will be able to afford politicians, not the navel gazing ignoramuses like the author of the damn article.