The trouble seems to be that they're being too conservative. Following distance is what it is because of human reaction times. You have to process the input with your brain, decide what to do, move your foot, then the car starts to slow down. In principle a computer can do it faster and so doesn't need as much space.
Moreover, everybody would like following distance to be dictated by safety, but in practice it's dictated by traffic volume. If you have traffic averaging three car lengths between each car and then twice as many cars merge into the highway, either you end up with one car length between each car, or you end up with stopped traffic. There is no third option.
The problem right now is that they're still using the human driver as a backup, so using the safe-for-computers following distance doesn't mesh with that, but using the safe-for-humans distance is a violation of standard behavior. So they're stuck choosing between the unsafe thing everybody does, or the "safe" thing that then becomes unsafe anyway because of how everyone else reacts to it.
Following any closer then 2 seconds of traveling distance on a clear, dry day, 3 seconds at night, or in the rain, 4 seconds on a rainy night should be considered reckless driving.
"The easiest way to make people stupid is to limit their degrees of freedom"
Cars really only have 2 degrees of freedom: linear acceleration and radial acceleration. In traffic, these DoFs go down by a lot. You ability to de/accelerate linearly is very limited by the cars behind you and in front of you. Your turning also goes down to nearly a binary choice of 1 lane left/right.
Get people 4-wheeling and the stupid is very much still there, but just to get back to a main road, you have to use your noggin a fair bit more. Folks tend to think things through and weight choices more.
The social dynamics are themselves a dimension. Social network graphs can behave as fractals. In a gymnasium filled with people, there is a significant 'fractallyness' to the social network. In traffic, the fractallyness is very limited to just about all the people in the road near you. The social graph, though more fluid in a traffic jam than a pep-rally, is still fairly small.
3Blue1Brown has a great video on the dimensionality of fractals [0] that is useful here. I'm just going to spitball, but I'd bet that the dimensionality of the social graph of a traffic jam is really close to 1.
So in the end, the DoFs of a traffic jam are probably very close to 3, but just a bit over. Say, 3.14-ish. ;)
I'd assume the Tesla to have a lot better (quicker) reaction skills than you and you should probably just trust it (in this particular scenario) and relax, even though the distance might _feel_ too short.
On my regular commute, the freeway interchanges that I must take, are too frequent, that I don't think the AutoPilot is worth the trouble to switch on. Especially when the freeway is empty, since I would have to take control of the car every few minutes.
The only scenario where I think AutoPilot is worth the effort to switch on, is if I must drive long distances on the same freeway, where you don't have to switch freeways. Like the drive from LA to SF. Or LA to Vegas. Or even just staying on the same freeway for 20 to 30 minutes.
I hope they can fix this deficiency. This AutoPilot technology is definitely beta, if they can't perfect simple stop-and-go freeway traffic.
It's weird because this really feels like one of the areas where technology could really excel in.
I have a feeling these systems won't really be great until all cars are using them and considering I don't see that happening, I don't see them gaining a ton of traction, unfortunately.
On the whole, I find a 3+ hour drive a lot less stressful with the adaptive cruise control, and I arrive feeling much less fatigued.
Ideally your autonomous car would also take part in the community of tailgaters and communicate forward that the current speed is unacceptable if this is the consensus of several tailgating vehicles, and gently reduce distance in a controlled way until the car in front gives in and speeds up or yields.
There's a reason it's called a safe following distance. Anything closer and you cannot stop in time. Even temporarily. Especially when autonomous cars in front of you may be suddenly braking as well.
We don't negotiate with terrorists for a reason.
The solution is to remove dangerous drivers from having control of 2-ton deathtraps, not contributing to the same behavior that is causing the problem.
Opportunistic, unsafe behavior is exactly the reason we need autonomous vehicles, rather than human-controlled vehicles.
Or detect their preferred following distance for any given speed when the system isn't running and copy that.
Good way to get self-driving cars banned before they take off.
Ironically the parent was probably technically going over the speed limit, though everyone goes over the speed limit there. Whoever builds automated traffic violation software would need to be very fairhanded in order to not upset the status quo.
I'm not sure I want to live in a future where my Tesla is a mobile sensor platform for someone else's benefit besides myself and Tesla, although I can see the allure of negating the need for LEO patrols on road infrastructure once a critical mass of sensor platform vehicles is reached in an area. This would require a herculean amount of governance and transparency to be okay with me, and I would expect more sanity in road legislation (higher reasonable top speeds, for example) as well.
There were two main issues that had to do with following distance.
1: I had it set to 80mph and the other cars in the hov lanes on I-80 were going 75-80 and I was impressed how the car maintained a relatively safe following distance. This seems to irritate the other drivers and I would have tailgaters and eventually people would pass me on the right to occupy the space in front of me causing the car to slow down to get back to a safe following distance, causing the tailgaters to receive an autonomous brake check.
2: In slower traffic around 30mph (still set to 80) that same safe following distance allowed other drivers to cut me off, and several times the brakes engaged hard when the collision detector was activated. The first time that happened I was not prepared and I barely got my foot to the brake pedal in time. I decided after the second time that happened to turn it off as the time it took initialize my foot press the brake was too long, that when I was actively pressing the gas/brakes I could react much quicker to traffic.