A passenger can potentially be just as rude as a driver.

That quote is actually from the passenger criticizing the self driving car as being "too polite."

I assume their regular driver is always willing to wind down the window and yell at pedestrians, or use the horn.

Perhaps passengers in self-driving cars should have a horn button.

Perhaps the passenger, who is described as someone acting like she has a chauffeur, should learn better manners and more respect for other people instead.

That would be ideal, but I'm not expecting any major changes in human nature simply because of technological change.

> Perhaps [17 year olds] ... should learn better manners and more respect for other people instead

A sentence we can all get behind, I suspect :-D

Jeez, yes. All the people in this part of the thread lamenting that self-driving cars will drive safely around pedestrians.

I expect this will be one of the problems with self driving cars. People will simply walk in front of them crossing the street whenever they want, knowing they won't be hit.

And also human drivers will cut off self driving cars all the time knowing the robot driver is extra careful and won't be aggressive.

I can see the first "greedy" local authority insisting that the cars upload footage of human drivers breaking rules in no time. These autonomous cars provide excellent surveillance capability at scale.

Good! Maybe cities will finally be able to reclaim their streets from automobiles https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/when-pedestrians-r...

Oh yeah. Also they have huge following distances so everyone is going to be merging in front of them. Honestly, I would feel so frustrated riding in one of these.

they can still honk aggressively. and they can take pictures of license plates

Honking won't mean much if it comes from a robot. People won't care about that.

License plates photos may help, but will the car send each of these to the police automatically? Police can quickly get swamped then by these reports from self driving cars.

> People won't care about that.

The people around them will notice the honking as well. That creates social pressure against people who cause the honking. Police only needs to act on a few of these violations to create a new consensus behavior.

Presumably the passengers could shout at the pedestrians if they like.

Starship Technologies autonomous delivery bots you might think would have a problem of people trapping or stealing them but seem ok - they have trackers, cameras and a loudspeaker that people at the base can say 'oi put me down' though. http://elitebusinessmagazine.co.uk/interviews/item/street-sm...

That seems like a solvable problem. If there's so many reports as to be swamping them, then just those with multiple violations would be reviewed.

Even taking a photo of the licensing plate is not trivial. If the robot car does not follow the violating car directly then its license plate may be at an angle where it can't be captured and if it can it may be distorted or angled, so a human is needed to view the footage (if a video is captured) to detect the actual license plate numbers, so automation can be a problem in practice.

I feel like I'm repeating myself, but that too seems like a solvable problem.

A car covered in sensors is likely a lot better at capturing and remember license plates than a human. Even keeping a memory of the last 60 seconds would be more than enough.

Technology-wise, Google is already very good at OCR. They even have algorithms to specifically identify license plates (as seen in Google Maps where they're fuzzed out).

This seems more a problem of policy (how would it be implemented?) than technology. And that too would evolve as necessity grew.