[jakelarkin]

normal driving requires anticipating the behavior of other humans who may or may not entire your path of travel or anticipating unseen obstacles. it has less to do with "reaction times" than one would think. Humans routinely over-drive their vehicles capability to safely stop for an obstacle in front or adjacent to their path of travel.

[cornholio]

> Humans routinely over-drive their vehicles capability to safely stop for an obstacle in front or adjacent to their path of travel.

Hence, the opportunity for an automated system that does not do that to be much safer, by relying on reaction times rather than strong AI.

Where a human driver would use subtle cues to anticipate a slowdown of the preceding vehicle before a turn, an automated system can get by by simply slamming the brakes in less than one millisecond when it detects braking from the other vehicle.

[jakelarkin]

... and that self-driving car will make its passengers car sick and get rear ended by the human driver behind it.

those types of twitchy driving mechanics aren't normal and don't share the road well with normal humans. The physics of cars and reaction times would dictate that we program a self-driving car to drive like Grandma .... always maintain safe low speeds, very long following distances and braking hard for sketchy actions by other cars or random things near the road, but we know that actually makes the road more dangerous as humans drivers will aggressively cut-off and rear end this self-driving grandma. Secondly, that type of driving creates a bad public impression of self-driving cars hurting their chances of adoption. If you read some of the earlier impressions of Google/Waymo cars its clear they went down that path initially and had to change their approach.