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Comment by Overtonwindow | Hacker News Reader

Not only does it not seem to have a horn, but it can't back up... I think those might be features the engineers should explore.

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To what end should a self driving vehicle back up or avoid a collision? You could essentially hijack a self driving car by boxing it in if it avoided all obstacles and impacts. Stopping seems to be the normal and best reaction to these sorts of illegal actions. At some point the driver in the wrong will need to take responsibility for doing something illegal.

Have you ever seen a car try to go through a yellow light, it turns red just a hair too soon, and the car decides to hit the breaks. Often times the car ends up well into the intersection and they have to back up, forcing the cars behind them to do so as well. I’m not defending the action of that driver who ends up in the intersection - they are obviously in the wrong. However, having a car stopped in the middle of the intersection is a dangerous situation, the other human drivers recognize that and reluctantly back up.

Driverless software must recognize situations like this and adapt in order to win the future. We will not go from manually operated cars to 100% driverless cars overnight. They will have to prove their worth and/or superiority alongside human drivers for a long time.

I have been on both ends of this situation, hitting a car behind me while trying evade a car backing into me and I have been backed into while stationary at a light and not having time to respond. In the end it's best not to try to back into traffic regardless. You just can't depend on traffic behind you to back up, especially if it is human driven, why would we expect an automated car to?

It's not the responsibility of vehicles behind that car in the intersection to fix things, human or otherwise.

You could also argue that a self driving car wouldn't be going as fast behind a car chasing a yellow light and could allow more room to handle this situation before it gets to that point.

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