Transportation

Self-Driving Cars Being Tailgated By Obnoxious Human Drivers


Let’s talk about those obnoxious people that insist on driving their car as though it is an extension of the rear bumper of your car.

Those irksome tailgaters come within inches of the back of your vehicle and sit there, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are dangerously close to your car. When this happens while on the freeway, zipping along at speeds exceeding 60 miles per hour, the odds are that those idiot drivers will not have sufficient reaction time if you have to suddenly jam on your brakes.

Some of these tailgating drivers seem to think that being on your bumper is no big deal. They do not calculate stopping distances and nor do they take into account the problems associated with driving that close to another car. For them, they are just intent on proceeding forward and are frustratingly blocked by your existence ahead of them.

Some tailgaters will try to get you to move out of the way. This might involve them flashing their headlights at you, doing so in hopes that you’ll realize they want you to skedaddle. Horn honking is another favored pastime. By-and-large, they usually simply use the menacing appearance of them being in your rearview mirror and having that charging bull look about them.

Justification by tailgaters is abundantly expressed.

They usually contend that the car ahead of them was moving too slowly. Of course, the speed-related question is a relative one. The car ahead of them might be doing the speed limit, lawfully proceeding, and yet that is insufficient for the needs of the tailgater. In their minds, no matter what speed you are going is either incorrect or not enough. The point is that anytime any car perchance is blocking the pace of another vehicle, by gosh that driver ought to expeditiously open the lane and stop bottlenecking things.

Admittedly, there are those knucklehead bottleneck drivers that are going well below the speed limit and think they own the road. In their view, it doesn’t matter what speed they wish to drive at. Their viewpoint is that we should all proceed in an orderly fashion. First come, first serve, as it were. If they happen to be in front of you and want to go at a pittance of a speed, that’s their right, and you should just bide your time and be properly patient to let them drive as they desire.

Sometimes the bottleneck driver does not realize they are indeed serving as a bottleneck. They are oblivious to anything happening behind their vehicle. The use of their rearview mirror is a rarity and they believe exclusively in looking ahead, not glancing backward. In that case, there are occasions wherein an entire parade of cars ends-up behind this myopic kind of driver. These intrepid bottlenecking obstructionists don’t care that they are needlessly constricting the flow of traffic.

Back to the tailgater and their view of the world, despite whatever transgression the up-ahead driver might be doing, whether purposely going too slowly or unintentionally holding things up, being glued to the bumper of another car is not warranted. Doing so is reckless. The tailgater is endangering themselves and anyone else in their vehicle. The tailgater is endangering the up-ahead driver and any passengers in their vehicle. The tailgater is undoubtedly endangering the cars next to them in adjacent lanes and likewise any stream of cars behind them.

The tailgater is apt to roll their eyes and complain that it is the up-ahead plodding driver that holds this grave responsibility and not the tailgater. That’s typically a false assertion. Though there is certainly a potential for the up-ahead driver to be in the wrong, it would seem that much of the time the tailgater is the primary transgressor and the up-ahead driver is simply obeying the law. Sure, traveling at just the speed limit or going slower due to driving conditions can be irksome for tailgaters, but this valid form of driving is not justification for playing the dicey tailgating game.

For those that find themselves upset with tailgaters, they vehemently lament that there ought to be laws about such driving actions.

States indeed usually have a specific legal rule or regulation about the act of adverse tailgating. For example, here in California, the official vehicle code under section 21703 says this: “The driver of a motor vehicle shall not follow another vehicle more closely than is reasonable and prudent, having due regard for the speed of such vehicle and the traffic upon, and the condition of, the roadway.”

Notice that the law does not explicitly declare what distance you should observe when behind another car. There is the old line that you ought to be at least one car length behind another vehicle for every ten miles per hour of speed. That is a handy and easily remembered rule-of-thumb, but it does not guarantee any semblance of safety.

The distance to remain behind another car is considered a judgment or driver choice, stipulated as the need to exercise reasonable and prudent care. As added clarification, the law provides a contextual indication that the otherwise amorphous notion of being reasonable and prudent encompasses the particulars of the speed, traffic, and roadway conditions at the time of the driving effort.

You might be wondering why isn’t the tailgating rule more specific?

The answer is that every driving situation is different and requires using mindful reasoning about what distance you ought to follow.

Suppose the road is a weaving mountainous path and there has been a heavy drop of snow. You could presumably be tailgating even if utilizing the popular rule of the one car length per ten miles per hour. Another example would be driving on a crowded freeway in rainy weather. On and on we go, having to consider a slew of factors to arrive at what might be a proper distance to avert being a tailgater.

Having a law to go after tailgaters is essential and yet it doesn’t necessarily stop the adamant tailgating driver. The odds of a tailgater getting caught doing a tailgating action is generally low. Unless we had the highway patrol or traffic police continually cruising to spot the tailgaters, most tailgaters figure they are free and clear to do their tailgating.

Sadly, many fatal car accidents can be traced to tailgating, regrettably an outcome that is akin to having already let the horse out of the barn.

To some degree, in any practical sense, the driver that is being tailgated has to be on the alert about tailgaters and opt to deal with the situation, rather than relying upon the tailgater to do what is right. Yes, this seems backward and shifts the duty from the party that appears to be in the wrong to the innocent, but that’s the reality of daily driving.

What can the driver that is being tailgated do?

First, the driver should be aware of the potential for being tailgated. By watching the traffic behind you, it is oftentimes possible to anticipate those upcoming cars that might end-up trying to tailgate you. Any cars doing ninety miles per hour and fast approaching are unlikely to slow down and won’t magically remain at a safe distance.

Second, the driver that might get tailgated has to detect that tailgating is about to occur or is actually underway. If you don’t know that you are being tailgated there is little chance to do something about it.

Third, the driver that is being tailgated can take various actions, some that are reasonable and prudent, while other actions that are brash and perilous. The circumstances will dictate what is sensible and what might be treacherous. For example, tapping your brakes is a common ploy, attempting to signal to the tailgater that you want them to desist. Unfortunately, the mere act of tapping the brakes might not be enough to inform the tailgater, or worse still the tailgater gets angry and decides they will ride even closer to your bumper.

The actions of the tailgated driver can spark the tailgater into avid road rage. Again, it is unfair to point a finger at the tailgated driver, but that’s the real-world of driving. The tailgater might in their mind become obsessed with trying to target the car being tailgated. Even if the tailgated car moves over, the tailgater might choose to follow that vehicle, persistently tailgating, in some oddball viewpoint that they are garnering revenge or somehow morally “teaching” the tailgated car a useful lesson.

Shifting gears, in the future, we will have a prevalence of self-driving cars that are not being driven by humans and instead by AI-based driving systems.

This brings up an interesting question: Will the advent of AI-based true self-driving cars obviate any further tailgating or might tailgating still exist?

Let’s unpack the matter and see.

Understanding The Levels Of Self-Driving Cars

As a clarification, true self-driving cars are ones that the AI drives the car entirely on its own and there isn’t any human assistance during the driving task.

These driverless vehicles are considered a Level 4 and Level 5 (see my explanation at this link here), while a car that requires a human driver to co-share the driving effort is usually considered at a Level 2 or Level 3. The cars that co-share the driving task are described as being semi-autonomous, and typically contain a variety of automated add-on’s that are referred to as ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems).

There is not yet a true self-driving car at Level 5, which we don’t yet even know if this will be possible to achieve, and nor how long it will take to get there.

Meanwhile, the Level 4 efforts are gradually trying to get some traction by undergoing very narrow and selective public roadway trials, though there is controversy over whether this testing should be allowed per se (we are all life-or-death guinea pigs in an experiment taking place on our highways and byways, some contend, see my coverage at this link here).

Since semi-autonomous cars require a human driver, the adoption of those types of cars won’t be markedly different than driving conventional vehicles, so there’s not much new per se to cover about them on this topic (though, as you’ll see in a moment, the points next made are generally applicable).

For semi-autonomous cars, it is important that the public needs to be forewarned about a disturbing aspect that’s been arising lately, namely that despite those human drivers that keep posting videos of themselves falling asleep at the wheel of a Level 2 or Level 3 car, we all need to avoid being misled into believing that the driver can take away their attention from the driving task while driving a semi-autonomous car.

You are the responsible party for the driving actions of the vehicle, regardless of how much automation might be tossed into a Level 2 or Level 3.

Self-Driving Cars And Being Tailgated

For Level 4 and Level 5 true self-driving vehicles, there won’t be a human driver involved in the driving task.

All occupants will be passengers.

The AI is doing the driving.

If we had only AI-based self-driving cars on our roadways, the act of tailgating could be resolved. The AI systems of the self-driving cars could communicate with each other, using V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle) electronic communications, and coordinate their driving actions. They would be able to assess the driving conditions such as the weather, the roadway status, the amount of traffic, and ascertain what distances are safest to observe.

In theory, AI systems could optimize the distances involved. This means that the distance between cars would be the best or optimal for the given setting or conditions. Despite the seeming idealistic nature of this arrangement, there are still probabilistic facets to be considered. For example, suppose one of the self-driving cars that are involved in this collaboration suddenly has a tire blowout. Did the distance calculations assume that there are no chances of such a calamity, or did it anticipate this possibility and determine the distances accordingly?

The point is that we have a tendency to envision a Utopian world of all self-driving cars and yet this might not be especially practical and realizable.

Speaking of which, you might as well get out of your head the idea that we would have only self-driving cars on our roadway. In the United States alone, there are 250 million conventional cars (see my compilation of important stats related to self-driving cars, at this link here), and they are not going to disappear overnight. Furthermore, there is still the open question of whether human-driving will be somehow abolished, for which some people insist you will never take away their driving (only once you pry their cold dead hands from the steering wheel).

Discussions about having only self-driving cars on the roadways are usually confined to where this might be feasible to achieve. A given locale might declare that in their downtown district the only cars allowed will be self-driving cars. Another avenue is the proposed approach of having dedicated freeway lanes that are for self-driving cars only. None of those proposals entail a widespread and across the board environment exclusively for self-driving cars.

Alright, now that we’ve popped the bubble about the notion of solving the tailgating issue by only allowing self-driving cars on our roadways, this means that tailgating is going to continue for quite a time to come.

We can reasonably assume that the self-driving cars won’t be doing the tailgating (at least not by choice, as will be explained momentarily). Presumably, the AI systems will be programmed to avoid doing any tailgating. The automakers and self-driving tech firms are striving to have the AI be the kind of reasonable and prudent driver that is envisioned by the laws.

This is a tricky proposition.

Here’s why.

A self-driving car is driving along on the freeway. It is maintaining a proper distance from the car ahead of it. Without any forewarning, a car in the adjacent lane hops into the gap between the self-driving car and the car it is trailing behind. This immediately causes the self-driving car to ostensibly be labeled as a tailgater. Though it wasn’t the fault of the AI driving system, nonetheless the self-driving car is now at a shortened distance and now considered tailgating.

What should the self-driving car do?

I’m sure your immediate thought is that the self-driving car needs to quickly adjust to make-up for the momentary tailgating action. A human driver might do so, slowing down to allow for a greater gap or possibly opting to switch lanes to prevent from being too close to the interloper. We would certainly expect any AI worth its salt to do the same.

If you think about this for a second or two, you’ll realize that this reaction to avoid remaining in a tailgating posture is going to have a decidedly pronounced rippling effect. Right now, when a human driver slows down or makes a lane change, we don’t especially witness how this impacts all the other nearby traffic. Imagine that there were self-driving cars commonly on our roadways, and you then can envision the cascading effects of what will happen.

The disruption by that human interloper will cause the immediately impacted self-driving car to take avoidance action. Once the self-driving car does so, the odds are that other self-driving cars nearby will also then react. That’s one form of cascading. Meanwhile, the interspersed human drivers will also be reacting, doing so in response to the cascading of the self-driving car’s movements. The whole thing becomes like a set of dominos that were set into motion by one tiny shove.

You could try to argue that this same thing happens today. Yes, human drivers do this same kind of responsive driving, but not to the magnitude and consistency that the AI driving systems will do so. This is going to be a humongous upward scaling of this kind of traffic reacting driving.

In any case, we need to consider the other side of the coin too, namely that besides the self-driving car trying to avoid being a tailgater, there is also the use case of the self-driving car being tailgated.

What should a self-driving car do when it is being tailgated?

Well, we are all assuming that the self-driving car is presumably going to be driving in a presumptively legal way. In that case, the AI driving system is considered “in the right” and the tailgater is in the wrong. We might also reasonably assume that the tailgater is not a self-driving car, since, as just discussed, the AI driving systems are presumably going to try and avoid being a tailgater.

This means that we have a situation of a human driver that is tailgating a self-driving car.

Will that ever happen?

Yes, in fact, it happens all the time, right now.

During the experiments of the self-driving cars on our public roadways, it is exceedingly common to witness human-driven cars tailgating the self-driving cars.

Sometimes, a human driver opts to stay back from the self-driving car under a kind of fear of what the AI might do, or maybe out of respect for the AI, or perhaps due to being in awe of the AI. Generally, once the public in a given area gets used to seeing the self-driving cars on the roadways, they begin to treat self-driving cars as they would a human driver.

There is a tendency to treat self-driving cars as though they are like a newbie teenage driver. This translates into the belief by the human driver that the AI is unfamiliar with driving and going to be problematic. Newbie teenage drivers tend to strictly obey the speed limit, and stridently come to a full stop at stop signs. That is a huge source of irritation to many seasoned drivers. In our dog-eat-dog world, the moment that many drivers see a car being driven by a newbie, all bets are off and the seasoned drivers will pull all sorts of dirty tricks, including tailgating. The tailgating only makes things worse, since the newbie teenage driver gets flustered and becomes more cautious in their driving.

The emphasis overall is that we know for sure that human drivers will tailgate self-driving cars. It happens now. It is assuredly coming to happen in the future.

For most of the self-driving cars on the roadways today, the AI driving system is not specially programmed to do anything about being tailgated. In a manner of speaking, the AI is akin to those tailgated drivers that are generally oblivious to the cars behind them. Dealing with tailgaters is only significant to the degree that the AI can calculate what might happen if the self-driving car needs to come to a fast halt.

Few of the AI driving systems are currently set up to take any overt or evasive maneuvers. For example, tapping the brakes is not something that most AI systems are programmed to do, which as discussed earlier humans might do. One supposes the AI systems shouldn’t be tapping their brakes, since the result might spark road rage, perhaps extraordinary road rage (what, some stupid AI thing is trying to tell me that I am tailgating, by darn that is outrageous, some human drivers might think).

The AI driving system could potentially speed-up, but this is questionable in that if it has to exceed the speed limit this then appears to cast the AI into being a lawbreaker. The more likely choice would be to switch lanes and let the tailgater go past. Unfortunately, changing lanes can be dicey, plus it might not be a viable option in all circumstances.

Conclusion

Tailgaters would seem to be with us even in an era of self-driving cars.

There is some chance though of dealing with those scofflaws.

Keep in mind that self-driving cars are chockful of sensors, including video cameras, radar, LIDAR, thermal imaging, ultrasonic, and so on. Those are what I call the “roving eye” of self-driving cars (see my discussion at this link here). This is worth noting because a self-driving car can readily record the actions of other drivers.

Recall that earlier I had pointed out that we cannot expect to have the highway patrol or traffic cops on the prowl and continuously trying to spot tailgaters. No need for that kind of effort in the future. The self-driving car can be the eyes and ears, as it were, and provide that data to the authorities.

In short, a human-driver might get pegged for tailgating due to a self-driving car that tattled on that human driver. By uploading the collected data to the local authorities, a ticket could be issued for tailgating. For those that are tailgated today, there would seem nothing more satisfying than to imagine the look on the face of that tailgating aggressor than for them to receive a ticket in the mail, having gotten caught red-handed in their fiendish tailgating act.

Maybe this will endear some of us to the AI systems, whilst others will rue the day that AI self-driving cars became ubiquitous.



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