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That's a pretty big claim with no evidence. Even if people can easily identify self-driving cars and use that to decide to merge, it may just increase their agg

That's a pretty big claim with no evidence. Even if people can easily identify self-driving cars and use that to decide to merge, it may just increase their aggressive driving behavior to the point where they cut off self-driving cars at dangerous times. A cutoff that forces the self-driving car to slam on the brakes will propagate backwards and cause more of the fabled phantom traffic jams.

cosmie 9y ago
It's conjecture, provided as a counterpoint to the conjecture in the parent post about requiring near 100% adoption of autonomous vehicles in order to see the benefits. You're completely right that it could cause an increase in aggressive driving behavior. But it's just as possible that it'll decrease aggressive driving behavior. My conjecture's based off of three personal observations: 1) A lot of the aggressive drivers I know that have road rage-like tendencies take it as a personal affront when another driver does something like turn in front of them or using a less congested lane of traffic to get as far ahead as possible before getting over. 2) One of the most effective strategies I had available as a retail manager to diffuse a situation with an irrational/irate customer was to pass blame on to "the system/corporate policy" if they couldn't see reason. They'd still be irate, but they'd redirect their behavior towards something other than the immediate situation. The same principle applies when you go from blaming a specific driver to blaming "those damn autonomous Nissans. They always <insert some peculiar trait of Nissan's self driving implementation>". 3) Aggressive driving is hard to escalate into full-blown road rage when one participant is a computer. As you said, it'll react to the situation by potentially braking aggressively, but it won't then try to tailgate the individual and escalate the situation. It'll back off appropriately and assure that it's not put into that position again and be done with it. Aggressive drivers will get bored with antagonizing autonomous cars when they get used to them and to the fact that you can't get a rise out of them. As well, autonomous cars can likely get better at identifying indicators/patterns of an aggressive driver and account for that.
boznz 9y ago
At least there will be lots of factual and camera evidence from the self driving car computer to make a case against the arseholes who do this.

cosmie 9y ago

It's conjecture, provided as a counterpoint to the conjecture in the parent post about requiring near 100% adoption of autonomous vehicles in order to see the benefits. You're completely right that it could cause an increase in aggressive driving behavior. But it's just as possible that it'll decrease aggressive driving behavior. My conjecture's based off of three personal observations: 1) A lot of the aggressive drivers I know that have road rage-like tendencies take it as a personal affront when another driver does something like turn in front of them or using a less congested lane of traffic to get as far ahead as possible before getting over. 2) One of the most effective strategies I had available as a retail manager to diffuse a situation with an irrational/irate customer was to pass blame on to "the system/corporate policy" if they couldn't see reason. They'd still be irate, but they'd redirect their behavior towards something other than the immediate situation. The same principle applies when you go from blaming a specific driver to blaming "those damn autonomous Nissans. They always <insert some peculiar trait of Nissan's self driving implementation>". 3) Aggressive driving is hard to escalate into full-blown road rage when one participant is a computer. As you said, it'll react to the situation by potentially braking aggressively, but it won't then try to tailgate the individual and escalate the situation. It'll back off appropriately and assure that it's not put into that position again and be done with it. Aggressive drivers will get bored with antagonizing autonomous cars when they get used to them and to the fact that you can't get a rise out of them. As well, autonomous cars can likely get better at identifying indicators/patterns of an aggressive driver and account for that.

boznz 9y ago

At least there will be lots of factual and camera evidence from the self driving car computer to make a case against the arseholes who do this.