| >paraphrased: "muh safe following distance" You (and every other commenter over the years peddling the same garbage) are taking simplified rules of financial liability and then working backwards to get the rules of the road. You can't run it in that direction because the rules are intentionally simplified and lose resolution for the sake of expedience. No traffic behaves like you're acting it ought to except industrial applications where some other thing dominates vehicle spacing. Following distances are set at like the 90-somethingth percentile and then other techniques are used to mitigate those last few percent. For example in your intentional appeal to emotion pedestrian example, the other traffic is not just looking at the back of your car. It's maintaining situational awareness of "issues" coming from other directions like your pedestrian presumably coming from the side. So other cars will probably start braking around the same time as you and 90-something percent of the time there won't be any issue. In cases without obvious external inputs humans use stereotype and vibes based judgement. When drivers see a Fiat 500 (or some other minimum viable appliance car) adorned with one of those student driver stickers everyone gets on Amazon going down an on-ramp at "this is gonna make for a spicy merge at best" speed other drivers subconsciously think "this guy is probably a bad driver, I bet he's gonna screw it up and come to a stop at the end of the ramp and just expect other traffic to deal" so they back off to maintain their "good enough" following distance. Fielding a bunch of vehicles that are too hair trigger when it comes to hard-ish stopping is basically just exploiting intentional lack of nuance in our rules of financial liability. A "self driving car" that drives like a 16yo with a learners permit is self driving. We require those people be supervised specifically to minimize these sorts of things. Additionally drivers who drive in such a manner (we all know someone who insists they're good driver despite being the common denominator in a lot of accidents insurance found not their fault) as to exploit the same lack pretty strong vested interest in that nobody exploit those rules at scale because that could result the rules be changed to have more nuance. The self driving vehicle's behavior is not excusable even if they didn't wind up paying the bill for it and arguing otherwise is mis-informed at best. |