> The anecdotes highlight how challenging it can be for self-driving cars, which are programmed to drive conservatively, to master situations that human drivers can handle with relative ease, like merging or finding a gap in traffic to make a turn.
Human drivers are terrible at both of these. I'm regularly getting stuck behind people who won't make a right turn even as a line of people are making the left turn that shields the turn they're trying to make. I see a lot more promise of computer-driven cars at least being able to improve over time as a group.
I'm assuming here that you mean an uncontrolled right turn, where the right turn is at a red light or stop sign.
Is that Left Turn lane also uncontrolled in that moment that you are complaining about? That is, are you talking about the situation where people in the next lane are making a left turn at a green left turn only light or is it the uncontrolled stop sign (though rare to have a multi-lane stop sign) or more common flashing yellow left turn light (or jurisdictional equivalent; as some states allow uncontrolled left turns on red lights, and some drivers think all states do though they do not)?
In the case of people making an uncontrolled left turn when you are attempting an uncontrolled right turn you have an interesting relative to the prisoner's dilemma. As you point out, there should be some "shield" from mistakes in opposing traffic by nature of the person to your left making a left turn. But that same "shield" also blocks your vision of intersection, so you have to trust that the person making the uncontrolled left turn is situationally aware of their surroundings to not make a mistake. Even as a physical "shield" in that moment, basic physics will remind you that momentum is a jerk (terrible pun intended) and there is no guarantee that the left turning car will absorb any or all of an impact. In making that right turn you may not be risking a direct impact, but you can still be risking a three or more car pile-up.
To cover both bases, if the left turn is controlled at that moment, with a green left turn light, at least where I live that often means the opposite left turn light is also on, which is not a good opportunity for an uncontrolled right turn either. (Also too because depending on intersection size and layout here too the people making the controlled left turn to your immediate left may decrease the visibility of oncoming traffic making the left turn on the other side of the intersection.)
I get honked at somewhat routinely for precisely these scenarios, and I doubt most of the people think of that sort of risk calculus in their impatience in those moments (and they certainly don't have my assessment of intersection visibility from behind me).
I wouldn't program a car to make an uncontrolled right turn in those situations either, and it certainly sounds like that sort of behavior is what is causing some of the complaints in the linked article.
Yes, I'm talking about an uncontrolled right turn. The left turn I'm talking about isn't from the next landed, but the one you'd make if you made a U-turn immediately after your right and then a left to go back the way you came. If the road is clear enough for several people to make that left, it's clear enough to make your right turn.
Human drivers are terrible at both of these. I'm regularly getting stuck behind people who won't make a right turn even as a line of people are making the left turn that shields the turn they're trying to make. I see a lot more promise of computer-driven cars at least being able to improve over time as a group.