Humans can stop dead as well, which is just as unpredictable. For example: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/emma-czornobaj-loses...

> it is unpredictable and a driverless car that behaves this way is going to cause problems.

Sure, but less problems than if it just kept on going and hit something. While rare regular cars have unpredictable things happen and many of them are a lot worse than a car coming to a controlled stop on the road. As a driver you need to be able to handle that. When there is a catastrophic failure of the vehicle the other vehicles need to safely react.

Now I’m just imagining endless gridlock because an AV randomly stops mid highway, and all the other AVs reasonably stop, creating waves of backup. And this happening on a fairly frequent intermittent cycle.

Big is different, and scaling this kind of thing to majority of vehicles on the road can cause all sorts of interesting problems.

I’m not saying it’s inevitable; sure, we can and most likely will improve things on the long road to majority AV. This simply occurred to me and I hadn’t seen it articulated before so thought I’d share.

It is better than what most people do now: just keep driving hoping things are safe. If AVs are regularly stopping on the highway that implies there is a problem with the road design.