The other week I drove a hire car with "intelligent cruise control" which, as you'd expect, tried to keep a safe following distance from the car in front.
The problem was, the cruise control following distance was not the ~2 seconds recommended by my country's highway code, but more like ~3.5 seconds. Other drivers would interpret that as an invitation to merge, and my car would slow down further to restore its ~3.5 second following distance.
I don't think you can drive in such a way that other drivers' behaviour is of no consequence.
There's plenty of cities in the U.S. where the local driving culture is so aggressive, if you are unwilling to cut someone off you just aren't going to be able to merge at all or get through the intersection, and that will undermine the brand if people are supposed to be commuting these cars through rush hour to work and it takes twice as long because the cars are too passive.
It's common to merge on a highway under speed, knowing you will be hammering the throttle and the car in the right lane behind you will slow down, but could self driving cars make that same judgement to merge or stay in the onramp lane waiting for the nonexistant opening? And if they do make that judgement and other cars do let themselves be cut off, what happens in the 1/1000 time that this maneuver results in an accident, and the self driving company is brought to court? These companies are going to be held responsible for these judgement calls that human drivers make every day. There's a highway near me where to merge onto the next interchange you have to cross four lanes of traffic in 0.25-0.5 miles, could a self driving car fight for that opening during rush hour? I don't think there would be a safe way to do it unless every single car on the road is a self driving car, and that's just not possible when most drivers can barely afford $2000 cars from 30 years ago.
I originally typed out a reply saying that if I bought a sure-to-be-expensive self-driving car, I would be disappointed if it made my trip slower.
But then I thought that maybe if I wasn't the one fighting to get into lanes I wouldn't care that my trip ended up a couple of minutes longer, I would just relax and read a book and not even pay attention while all that was happening.
Not sure if that would work in reality though. In my city if a car that was that passive was recognized, people would just take total advantage of it and never let it in, cut it off, etc. I think that I would still get annoyed watching this as a passenger.
The car would have to make sudden stops to avoid accidents every time someone cut it off as well, which would be unpleasant for a passenger.
The problem was, the cruise control following distance was not the ~2 seconds recommended by my country's highway code, but more like ~3.5 seconds. Other drivers would interpret that as an invitation to merge, and my car would slow down further to restore its ~3.5 second following distance.
I don't think you can drive in such a way that other drivers' behaviour is of no consequence.