Human drivers regularly cut in front of self-driving cars with two meters less space than they would give a person.
Real-world driving data shows that people exploit the cautious programming of autonomous vehicles to merge aggressively. Most observers expected humans to be more careful around unpredictable AI technology. Instead, drivers treat robot cars like pushovers because they know the machine will always slam on the brakes to avoid a collision. This behavior creates a specific type of road bullying that slows down traffic for everyone else. Society is subconsciously training itself to take advantage of machines that are programmed to be polite.
Cut-In Gap Acceptance Toward Autonomous vs. Human-Driven Vehicles: Evidence from the Waymo Open Motion Dataset
arXiv · 2605.01485
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are widely known to follow conservative, rule-based motion policies that surrounding drivers can learn to anticipate. A direct consequence is that human drivers may accept shorter longitudinal gaps when cutting in front of an AV than when targeting another human-driven vehicle (HDV). We test this hypothesis using the Waymo Open Motion Dataset (WOMD), which provides 25,906 real-world highway scenarios at 10 hertz. An eight-criterion lane-change detector extracts 706 HDV-