The solution is to get people to stop being assholes on the road. Fine tailgaters. I care about the safety issues caused by them a lot more then I do about people going 6 over the limit.

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.

I feel like driving cars turns most people into idiots, myself included at times.

I don't have the citation, but I remember this quote:

"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.

Are the horn and middle finger(s) not also degrees of freedom?

Actually, you make a good point.

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. ;)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gB9n2gHsHN4

The easiest way to solve this problem is to have serious standards from driving license tests. Have would be drivers perform reliably in a variety of conditions and in longer trips and mercilessly fail people who do not meet the high bar.

Rather than apply the brakes, barring the person jumping in front of you and braking, it could just stop applying the accelerator. Nice easy slowdown to create the gap without brake-jobbing somebody behind you.

Haven't driven a Tesla but I'm quite sure the safe braking distance is a lot shorter than it _feels_ like for a human and this is actually one of the tasks I'd rather leave to a computer than a human.

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.

Driving a Tesla for almost a year now and when I had mine for 2,5 weeks it crashed into a car in front of me on AutoPilot in slow moving traffic. Stop and go. After 15 stops, it moved again, but this time didn't stop. I just sat there expecting it would brake. It didn't. There was no major damage, just about $1500 due to a small dent in the hood. AutoPilot is beta. Don't trust it to be quicker than you. It will fail in ways humans do not ever expect. Always pay attention and take control if it feels off.

This is terrible. This is the exact reason why I would want to buy a Tesla. Just for the AutoPilot to drive the car in bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic. If it does not work reliably in this situation, then the AutoPilot is essentially worthless to me.

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.

I stand corrected.

It's weird because this really feels like one of the areas where technology could really excel in.

This is true, the car can panic stop very quicky. The problem is I want to leave enough space to dodge pot holes that the car in front of me just drove over, since Autopilot can't really do anything about that (nor do I expect it to)