Another interesting element to this is basic human body and behavioural language that can be used to telegraph intent. As a pedestrian, making eye contact with

Another interesting element to this is basic human body and behavioural language that can be used to telegraph intent. As a pedestrian, making eye contact with a driver in order to determine intent is a key element of safety (which is why I detest folks who tint their windshield or front driver/passenger windows). The same is true driver-to-driver... folks often telegraph their moves via lane position, head movement, etc, before they actually make them, allowing an attentive driver to anticipate what someone else is going to do. Automated vehicles obviously can't provide those signals, which may cause human drivers to struggle to predict their behaviour; doubly so if, as the article points out, they already operate in a way that violates local social norms among human drivers. Worse, this can vary from place-to-place. Around the valley, extreme high speed on the freeway might be the norm, where elsewhere, that might be the exception (certainly around here, anything beyond 10kph above freeway speeds is atypical). Do these companies, then, need to somehow dynamically adjust to local norms?