[nexuist]

> A good driver accelerates on that ramp on beats the truck by 2-3 car lengths and merges at speed

No. A good driver stops at the yield sign if an approaching vehicle is 2-3 car lengths away. It is dangerous to play guessing games with your car's engine and another driver's attention. If anything goes wrong (tire puncture, engine dies, slippery road, truck driver slams the gas) you have successfully managed to put yourself into the direct path of a speeding brick wall 5x as heavy as you. There is never a safe merging scenario where the right choice is to slam the gas pedal to beat another driver to the punch, especially not when merging onto an active freeway.

If there is a yield sign at the end of the onramp, that means prepare to yield. If there is not a yield sign, then the expectation is to keep merging. There wouldn't be a point to the yield sign if everyone treated it as if it didn't exist.

> leaves its front end sticking out into the oncoming traffic,

I also agree with you but this may be a byproduct of the camera's perspective and maybe it would look normal in the driver's seat. We don't really have a great view but the truck could also have been hugging the curb which would have brought it closer to the car than it should be.

> dangerously merges sheepishly without accelerating fast enough

Fully agree here. If you merge you have to commit to matching the speed of nearby vehicles or else you're creating a dangerous situation. Mobileye should have sped up much faster than it did.

I'm not a neural network, fwiw.

[aimkey]

I think you should watch the scenario again. The car is only beat to the junction by the truck towing the trailer because the Mobileye car takes the wide-radius ramp at sub 22 km/h (13 mph). Normal human driver takes that ramp at 40-50 km/h, follows the hatchback out of the junction at flow of traffic speed, with 2-3 seconds of distance behind them for the truck to have a safe braking distance. The truck would have no need to modify speed, and the Mobileye car would satisfy the yield sign (not forcing another car to hit the brakes).

https://i.imgur.com/irkHBxc.png

I think people lower their expectations for autonomous systems. Driving the ramp at a speed a human would and taking that obvious gap to zipper-merge is the correct maneuver for a human. Perhaps you want the autonomous system to err on the side of caution, but I'm actually trying to hold it to a human standard.

But yeah, at the very least, don't get confused and sit there with your nose out in traffic. What's really scary is that this is the take Mobileye chose to go with. They probably had dozens more, with even worse blunders.