The image of people learning tricks to force autonomous cars to do things is quite entertaining... Will Google cars really jump forward if they think someone will hit them?
My post was half-serious half joking -- to be clear, I would not recommend fake road rage on Google self driving cars... What I have tested is that aggressively tailgating (at the time with an Audi A6 + ACC, which has extremely an extremely good AEB system thanks to *two* 77GHz radar systems in tandem) will cause the Google self driving Lexuses to speed up, at the time it was to 20mph above the speed limit, which was enough to unbox me and allow me to pass the car.
I think getting autonomous cars to coexist with humans is going to be really troublesome for this reason. I think for a lot of aggressive drivers, half of the reason why they don't do certain things is because they're afraid of getting into an accident, not because it's impolite. If you know you can always cut in front of or "shove aside" a self-driving car because it's programmed not to collide with you, there's a huge fairness problem to the autonomous car.
Technically speaking, you can do that to a Tesla already. If one is next to you and you want to get into its lane, first check that it's an AP model, then just slowly move to the left. Before long, the driver will get the TAKE OVER IMMEDIATELY alert and the car will start slowing down because AP will stop accelerating.
It will be really interesting to see how they eventually deal with these problems. Quite frankly I don't even think it'll be a "1.0" feature for Level 4 autonomous cars. There's just too many complicated scenarios and it's hard enough to make a car that doesn't drive itself into guard rails and stationary objects, much less one that outsmarts humans that try to take advantage of it.
