[_jab]

My guess is that the car is looking for a place to pull over (perhaps because the rider pressed the "pull over" button. In this mode, the car hugs the right side of the road until it can find a spot to stop, which would normally work alright, except in this one particular spot where the "right side of the road" is only this tiny island.

So the car just circles around it indefinitely.

[bhhaskin]

It's all of these edge cases that makes self driving cars impractical outside of optimal conditions.

[emmelaich]

Buridan's principle will tell you that there will always be edge cases.

There will always be room for improvement. The best you can do is to make them vanishingly rare.

[syndicatedjelly]

That would be the definition of an edge case

[steve_adams_86]

Islands are so common in driving, I would expect them to be anticipated or encountered early on in development.