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Comment by cygwin98 | Hacker News Reader

I kind of wonder how Google's driverless car handles the situation in extremely populous cities such as Shanghai or HongKong.

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That's part of what I'd like to see more.

  - scalability cases : many many moving obstacles.

  - reversal cases    : gCar behavior if a vehicle is misbehaving. 
                        What happens ? can they compute a safe avoidance path ? 
                        if not but with impact still being detected in advance 
                        by the system, can there be a pre-protection system ? 

  - systemic cases    : how 2 gCars react to each others, any oscillatory patterns ? 
                        computing a path using the same heuristic leading to 
                        avoidable collision. With more than 2 ?

Forgive me, but could you reformat that? In Firefox, the code-ified view of your text is taxing to read. It has an unpleasant scroll bar and I forget what I've read by the time I get halfway through it, since I can't see it.

Right, made it a fair bit more readable now. I'm difficult to read anyway.

Much better, thanks!

In the city, when there're many pedestrians on the roads, I would expect from autonomous car to drive slower and stop in case of pedestrian spotted (human drivers are smarter, but they usually violate speed limits and have worse reaction time)

I'm afraid that in New York, this would just lead to total gridlock as a few people would stop traffic by jaywalking, leading to a bigger flow of people following them.

There's a classic science fiction story that I cannot remember now where people do exactly that.

If it becomes a problem, the car can transmit images of the jaywalkers to the police.

I'd love to see it handle the 17th century layout of central london as well.

http://goo.gl/maps/PBaU1

I see them in heavy traffic on highway 101 near Mountain View most days of the week.

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