it apparently detected my presence (it’s covered in Go-Pros) and stayed stationary for several seconds. it finally began to proceed, but as it did, I rolled forward an inch while still standing. the car immediately stopped...

I continued to stand, it continued to stay stopped. then as it began to move again, I had to rock the bike to maintain balance. it stopped abruptly.

we repeated this little dance for about 2 full minutes and the car never made it past the middle of the intersection. the two guys inside were laughing and punching stuff into a laptop, I guess trying to modify some code to ‘teach’ the car something about how to deal with the situation.

the odd thing is that even tho it was a bit of a CF, I felt safer dealing with a self-driving car than a human-operated one.

The tidbit highlighted above is also a glimpse into how the testing program uses actual humans to “teach” the car to understand the countless unexpected things it might discover on the road. At Google I/O this year, Astro Teller gave us another glimpse into the testing process—which is challenging in part because Google’s testing team must recreate the nearly countless surprises a car could face on the road. Those tests included throwing beach balls at the car as it drives down the road, having a (fake) bird attack or swoop down towards it, and amazingly, having humans pop out of bags in the middle of the street.