I would guess there's a range of accelerations and relative to posted speeds that would be equally safe. Optimizing for passenger preference within that range is what I am referring to.
And I'm saying that there are people not inside your car that cares about how you're driving. Most of Uber's rides are in densely populated areas with plenty of other drivers, cyclists and pedestrians.
It'll be for sure interesting to see how this plays out, especially with other human aggressive drivers. If people know they can always cut off the robot car which annoyingly drives the speed limit everywhere, takes turns super slowly, and optimizes itself to stay in the car pool lane, I'd hate to be riding in one. I'm not sure how many people currently mess with the Google cars but I'm sure it's more than zero. "Hey, wouldn't it be fun to see what happens when I just sorta...drift over the line into the stupid robot car's lane?"
There will be mistakes. People will die at the hands of self-driving cars. There will be backlash. There will be people who "hunt" autonomous vehicles (look at drones, and consider how much people value airspace vs driving etiquette). GLHF.
