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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

There's still the issue that self-driving cars are too courteous compared to normal drivers. I wonder how/if they'll fix that. Imagine sitting in a self-driving car that can't "push" itself through traffic; or imagine sitting in a car behind that car ...

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I actually live in the greater Phoenix area and go to school at ASU, so I see Waymo and Uber autonomous around everywhere. I frequently see these things handle aggressive rush hour traffic with university pedestrians jumping out into the middle of traffic. They stay safe, but they clearly have a sense of when to go for it.

I’m also thinking of how human drivers will quickly learn to exploit this and get a feel of how to push the algorithm to get a slighgood advantage. Like, advancing a bit and stopping or getting a bit closer in order to merge in front of a self driving car.

People already do this with real drivers.

Now imagine if you kept encouring the same timid driver and everyone knew how to cut in front of them.

Maybe not timid, but considerate?

Changing lanes is a normal and necessary part of driving. I'm continuously amazed by people on the internet who talk about "cutting in front" like it's something only other people do, or who are apparently proud of preventing others from getting into the lanes they need to be in.

On the other hand, the self-driving car has a lot of cameras, good for collecting evidence, which may scare human drivers.

Maybe, but there are quirks you can exploit. Getting hit in the back of your car, for example, usually means fault is with the car behind.

Making the car more aggressive is not rocket science. The trouble is that this is where the safety benefit of self-driving cars will start to diminish. If you watch Chris Urmson's 2016 presentation at SXSW, he tells that the only accident Waymo had on a public road was when their car tried to push in front of a bus.

Self-driving cars may win out there because they have full circle sensing and can track many objects at once. They may be better at getting into a hole than humans delayed by head-turning time.

Another advantage self-driving cars have is reliable range rate. Humans are terrible at judging the speed of approaching objects. But radars are great at that.

The reflexes and attention on the self-driving car are going to be dramatically better; if there is a safe opening, the self driving car will be much better at exploiting it than a human would.

I hope this will overcome the "advantage" that humans gain by exploiting unsafe openings.

I mean, as is, I'm not a particularly aggressive driver; I lose some car-lengths because of that, and personally? I think that's okay.

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