What if self drive cars developed road rage ?

Google has a patent that explains that autonomous vehicles should be able to decide on behaviour based on the proximity of other vehicles in traffic. For example, a vehicle on a highway with a large truck on one side and a car on the other may decide to move to one side of its lane for safety sake. Or it may decide to accelerate past the truck to a safer area ahead.

This seems like an inevitable evolution of the simulation of existing traffic behaviour.

Humans piloting vehicles understand proximity in a different way - even when they drive into each other or cut each other off in traffic. One might hypothesize that a contributing factor to road rage is that the humans driving are autonomous and there is no overseeing power that prevents them from developing conflicts.

Consider now an entire environment of autonomous vehicles in close proximity. In the above example, the vehicle in the middle lane moves over to allow a safer zone around the truck. But the car on the other side sees the middle vehicle move closer and compensates by also changing position in its lane. The middle car sees that and reacts. By the dynamic proximity variations, there is now an unstable situation that is exacerbated by the very fast reflexes of the controlling computers. If this were to happen with many autonomous vehicles near each other, there could be massive disruption of the flow with lane concertinas and swerving.

If we now add in some complications - such as an obstacle in the road, wet roadway, or a human driver in the midst of the traffic then the potential problem is even larger.

Perhaps the right way to think about this spatial problem is to rethink the autonomous vehicle approach. With the present designs we are perpetuating the idea that each vehicle is a unit. The V2V communications work is well developed but there doesn't seem to be much thought about the conflict/feedback situation mentioned above. The intense research is focussed on the actual vehicle being smart enough to figure out how to deal with the dynamics of a complex and unpredictable traffic situation.

Perhaps the real time oversight of many autonomous vehicles attempting to cooperate in a limited space is a spatial problem that deserves attention from the spatial professionals ?