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Comment by bkjelden | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've noticed seeing the Lexus cars drive around Mountain View is that they're incredibly cautious.

I wonder what will happen once they become more commonplace, and human drivers realize they can be incredibly aggressive around the self-driving cars - cut them off, etc - and the self driving cars will happily accommodate the human driver, except with better reaction time and precision than a human driver could ever have.

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It'll probably make a lot more sense when you have a majority of cars that can act as a swarm rather than having to tolerate irrational and unpredictable human drivers. I can imagine there will be eventually some sort of standard for near field communication of autonomous drivers that can give hints about behavior rather than needing to infer them. Doesn't even need to be trusted or authenticated, a driver can just make more detailed signals than the human readable yellow and red lights that we currently use. Even just being able to say that you'll be turning in 1KM would make things significantly more efficient to navigate around. It extends even further if you want to have drivers like ambulances and fire trucks to have "sudo" powers, autonomous drivers can get themselves into a formation to allow the vehicle through before it is even visible over the horizon.

>human drivers realize they can be incredibly aggressive around the self-driving cars - cut them off, etc - and the self driving cars will happily accommodate the human driver

well, as my driving school instructor was saying - "Do yield to the moron".

My assumption is that this is intended to make a good first impression with the public - even if making the cars more risk-taking would result in a lower accident rate, an accident where the driverless car is technically "at-fault" can be very damaging to the overall project. Googlers working on the driverless car have explicitly talked about cautiousness as a dial that they've turned all the way up - not as an inherent requirement of the technology, but as a conscious decision.

Yeah, case in point, I was jogging on Cowper st (wide, 2-lane residential) Tuesday morning and noticed a self-drive Lexus had come to a stop behind a Palo Alto garbage truck that was making its usual stop-go-stop way down the street. After several long seconds, another car came up behind and stopped. More seconds. Second car pulled out and passed both Google and garbage truck. I jogged on and never saw whether the Google car turned off, or continued to tailgate the truck -- but it didn't pass me.

Probably the cars will hit them. If you look at the disclosed accidents list that seems to be not entirely uncommon (even if it isn't the robot car's "fault")

That said, an algorithm that learns how to prevent people from cutting it off would be interesting indeed.

Which cars will hit which other cars? If a driverless car can avoid an accident, especially by stopping, it will.

Ahh, the halting problem :)

I think it will be a long while before we have fully autonomous cars which drive better than humans even in the edge cases.

It depends on what you mean by better. Dealing with an unpowered stoplight by stopping is one thing, actually colliding into something else is different. It is already becoming common for new cars to have features which keep collisions from happening.

Not just other cars, but pedestrians too. It's common around here to see people trying to jam themselves into closing subway doors, often getting limbs or bags stuck in them. It's also not uncommon to see people try to help them by attempting to hold open or pry open the doors. One can imagine what some people will act like when they start to believe that cars will stop whenever they run out in front of them.

Well if you drive around any college campus you'll quickly find the results of that.

A more pedestrian friendly equilibrium in the game of chicken between people and cars?

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