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Comment by Meekro | Hacker News Reader

I've been in situations where I'm waiting to make a tricky left turn safely while people behind me literally yell at me to go faster. Now those same people have to contend with cars that can't be intimidated into making risky turns by the driver behind them yelling, honking, or tailgating. I hope it plays out like this:

1. Driver tailgates at an intersection or stop sign to try to intimidate the driverless car in front of him into going faster.

2. Driverless car ignores it, and gets rear-ended.

3. Google helpfully provides the tailgater's insurance company with a copy of the 360 degree video, conclusively proving his guilt under law.

4. Tailgater's insurance rates skyrocket after his insurer is forced to pay the maximum to repair the expensive driverless car.

5. Tailgater is forced to stop being a jackass.

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I think there may be a problem in step 5. Human nature is not that malleable and anyone that would be so dumb to rear end a car because it’s not turning soon enough will likely not change.

I upvoted you. But now that I reread the post above, I think that the implication there might have equally well been different - that the driver would not be able to afford alinsurance anymore and thus forced out of the privileged position of being able to (legally) drive. So the person might still be a jackass, but no longer a jackass driver.

The car still starts without auto insurance. There are still states where auto insurance isn’t even compulsory.

You can’t legislate civility. Attempting to force it with technology is even less effective.

Yesterday, as I was taking a left turn with my motorcycle on a big intersection with flashing red signals, I couldn't help but wonder if I'd be able to communicate with self driving cars that it's my turn. It was chaotic and required some level of consensus among the vehicles involved.

I had to deal with fully self-driving cars in SF a couple times and i actually became more aggressive about my right-of-way ("well, it's not going to hit me" i thought).

While relatively ideal, that ignores potential edge cases like the real driver driving with enough momentum to cause the driverless car he/she rear-ends to hit the car or curb or some other obstacle in front of them.

Hopefully by that point the driverless system's smart enough to apply all emergency braking to reduce the chance of that, but it's one possible scenario.

That sounds like it just changes step 4 into "Tailgater's insurance rates skyrocket after his insurer is forced to pay the maximum to repair the expensive driverless car and the maximum to repair everything the expensive driverless car was forced to hit."

Ah, I may have completely missed that earlier. Whoops.

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