The decal might be deliberately constructed (using perspective tricks) to alter the behavior of an autonomous car following your van. The cyclists might appear either much closer or farther than the plane they're drawn on. If you install a video panel on the back of your van, there are even more possibilities. You might be able to play a video of an object rapidly moving towards the autonomous car, which will cause it to swerve to try to avoid it.

And yes, some of this stuff will probably work on humans as well, but autonomous driving is supposed to be better than humans.

Deliberately malicious behavior would land such person in jail as soon as serious accident happens. You can do a many things to trick human drivers as well to cause an accident, the only reason we don't see this happening very often is because most people in society are decent human beings.

> Deliberately malicious behavior would land such person in jail as soon as serious accident happens

Edit: In the real world, this is more likely to happen by accident than intent.

No regulations exist yet.

The offender could claim whatever mod he made wasn't intended to cause harm to others. Then you have to prove intent, which can be difficult.

> The offender could claim whatever mod he made wasn't intended to cause harm to others. Then you have to prove intent, which can be difficult.

Or you have to have laws which cover acts done with mental states short of intent to cause harm like (in ascending I order of seriousness in existing law—and all of these are already covered for acts that get people killed) criminal negligence, recklessness, and depraved indifference to human life.

Of course, it's a lot less difficult to convince even a criminal jury of intent than people in HN often seem to think; legal proof, even to meet the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard, is far less than logical proof.

And what would be the point of a decal/video screen designed to trick people (Autonomous or not) into rear-ending your van?

That said I do agree with the premise of the article, in order to beat humans cars will need more sensors. As humans we have our two eyes behind a windshield that can be blocked by fog, heavy rain/snow, the glare from the sun, or distracted by a litany of other things.

By having multiple camera sensors in addition to things like radar, lidar and ultrasonic sensors it should be "easy" to beat humans at driving, something that the human body wasn't designed for.

> And what would be the point of a decal/video screen designed to trick people (Autonomous or not) into rear-ending your van?

There is a "popular" scam in China, where someone pretends to get hit by a car and then demands compensation. This occasionally leads to funny videos where they fall down too early and the car just drives around them; but I guess the scammers still make a profit.

Something similar could be done by luring autonomous cars into a crash and then trying to squeeze them for money.

This is also the reason so many Russian drivers have dash cams.

Car might brake suddenly because it thinks two bicycles are right infront of it?

Any car can break suddenly for any reason or no reason at all. It's not a tragic failure mode, instead, the desired situation is that all failures lead to this.

Braking suddenly is a great way to cause a crash.

Autonomous vehicle target being tailgated, operate device in front vehicle and autonomous vehicle slams on its brakes and gets rear-ended.

But that's not special. Vehicle brakes all the time and they/we don't optimize for a tailgater. That's an optimization to be deferred to the tailgater.

Or radio ads or music with emergency service vehicle sirens.

I believe this is illegal in my country (Netherlands). Also, the emergency services here can transmit a wide band FM signal with the siren sound, so you hear it playing over your radio when they come close.

I have never heard of this (Wide Band FM Siren Noise) and I think it's a fantastic idea. Why don't we do this in the US?

How would you hear the commercials?

Specifically: how would we hear the commercials from accident injury lawyers?