This is inevitable. With human drivers, I check to see if they are looking at me, or at least in my direction, before turning across them. There will need to be some way for autonomous vehicles to signal to other drivers, pedestrians, etc. that the vehicle know they’re there.
Good point. A robot head then. Sticking up from the hood. With a bunch of arms and making pistol signs at all the pedestrians around him.
See Johnny Cab except of course one inside to chat the passengers (turned toward the passengers then in chat mode, and deflated in privacy mode), and one on the hood to make pedestrians feel safe.
You're right, especially because a vehicle has to engage with a number of drivers simultaneously. I can tell where a driver is looking, and I can see that he's looking at me. While a vehicle could have some sort of indicator that say "I see you", it's somewhat harder to imagine how this would work when there are many other cars around (including a mix of AVs and human-driven vehicles).
I would guess that at some point cars will communicate directly with each other, and a light might appear on the dash to indicate that a vehicle is aware of your presence/intention. That way human drivers would know that it's safe to maneuver around the AVs whose paths he might cross. But it will probably be a decade before this sort of stuff is worked out, at the earliest.
