They definitely pushed the "aggressive" lever up a little over the last month.

I think it's one of those cases where it's sort of obvious it can calculate trajectories and speeds much better than a human, so it's a safe manoeuvre in theory, but it "feels" bad as a passenger.

Same thing for where it can see that it can squeeze through a tight "lane" but a normal human driver would probably wait until the oncoming traffic had passed.

Human drivers are often conservative because they don't know the speed/acceleration of a potentially colliding vehicle.

We look at something and estimate (How fast? Speeding up or slowing down?), but we don't know.

If you could put an actual number on it, I think you could drive a lot more "aggressively" and still be perfectly safe.

These cars estimate rather than ‘know’.

(Vehicle) Lidar/image multi-point calculation against a precision chronometer

(Human) Parallax and object size change estimation against an extremely irregular, low-precision chronometer

A brand new top of the line passenger jet would say e.g. "Caution: Acceleration" because it can work out the velocity of the plane, from there the acceleration and the remaining runway length (it uses GPS to identify the runway it's on) and take off speed and conclude we won't make it. Humans only decide that after it's far too late. Because it's much earlier the annunciation allows pilots to abort takeoff and investigate from the safety of the ground - in the Irish case they'd typed the wrong air temperature in and thus the engine performance was much worse than expected, with the right air temp it would have flown just fine

While humans do and will behave differently around these vehicles.

If your sensors can distinguish a Vespa from a sports bike reliably, compared to all the other things that an autonomous vehicle has to cope with programming it to treat those two as different categories of vehicle shouldn’t be particularly hard.

E.g. bicycle vs motorcycle vs Miata vs BMW 8-series vs Suburban vs tractor-trailer

Because that bounds agility, acceleration, and stopping distance, at least to the precision that it would differ in the next 10 seconds.

10 seconds? 10 seconds is an eternity.

Some vehicles of similar size might be more than 1/8th of a mile apart in straight line performance in 10 seconds-- let alone the difference once we've got multidimensional vectors.

(But, they can be quite different on the timescale of a second).

If you can't tell apart a bicycle from a 4-cylinder racing bike, let alone a vespa, that's what happnes. And Tesla can't. It also can't read hand signals given by cyclists. It can't tell apart a donkey and a horse.

If your goal was to interject an anti-Tesla offtopic comment to the general discussion of vehicle dynamics, it was unwelcome.

As you say, this is something they are constantly tweaking to find the perfect middle ground. That being said, maybe people are extra hyper aware of the turns when it's a self driving car, and wouldn't bat an eye or pay attention if it was a normal taxi driver?

“Your Honor, the pedestrian would have never been struck if the driver had set the system in its most conservative mode as we suggest on page 1,047 of Terms and Conditions.” /s

So, if you make it have the same aggressiveness on "average" by having it take advantage of its superior capabilities, those situations are going to feel sketchy to a person.

A self driving car might calculate it can squeeze through a gap in oncoming traffic but doing so probably will cause human drivers of those cars to slam the breaks and create a large crash.

So unless they’re driving on a road where only self driving is allowed they’ll probably need to be much more conservative than they can be.

Also thinking about it, the first roads to become robot-only driven will probably be inner city streets where pedestrians abound, so no aggressive driving there either.