[ClumsyPilot]

but they don't know capabilities orf vehicles, say a vespa vs some sports bike.

While humans do and will behave differently around these vehicles.

[rgmerk]

That seems like pretty weak sauce.

If your sensors can distinguish a Vespa from a sports bike reliably, compared to all the other things that an autonomous vehicle has to cope with programming it to treat those two as different categories of vehicle shouldn’t be particularly hard.

[ethbr1]

And really we're talking about mass, right? Which is approximated by size

E.g. bicycle vs motorcycle vs Miata vs BMW 8-series vs Suburban vs tractor-trailer

Because that bounds agility, acceleration, and stopping distance, at least to the precision that it would differ in the next 10 seconds.

[mlyle]

> at least to the precision that it would differ in the next 10 seconds.

10 seconds? 10 seconds is an eternity.

Some vehicles of similar size might be more than 1/8th of a mile apart in straight line performance in 10 seconds-- let alone the difference once we've got multidimensional vectors.

[ethbr1]

Exactly. I was thinking the longest span over which an accident could unfold.

[mlyle]

My point is-- vehicle dynamics only make a difference in the very short term, because after like a couple of seconds, vehicles can be almost anywhere relative to you even with low performance.

(But, they can be quite different on the timescale of a second).

[ClumsyPilot]

it only takes 0.2 seconds to turn a motorcyclist into ground beef

If you can't tell apart a bicycle from a 4-cylinder racing bike, let alone a vespa, that's what happnes. And Tesla can't. It also can't read hand signals given by cyclists. It can't tell apart a donkey and a horse.