Exactly, you wondered what a self driving car would do, because you have no idea what it would do, because you’re not familiar with the technology.

The computer inside your skull runs hundreds of times slower than the one inside your smartphone. An autonomous car is constantly getting streams of data from sensors looking in every direction, using senses no human possesses: radar vision, IR vision, magnetic fields, gyroscopes, ultrasound, inertial sensors… Your eyes see about 210 degrees at about 30 frames per second. An autonomous car is streaming 120+ frames per second from 360 degrees. The silicon processors inside an autonomous car have already analyzed and made sense of the entire scene before the optic signals have even reached your brain. Even once you’ve reached a decision on what to do, the signals to your muscles to actually turn the wheel or hit the petal are traveling at 268 miles per hour through your nerves. The signals traveling from the car’s computer to it’s controls are 2.5 million times faster.

So again, I ask: do you honestly believe that you can react faster than a modern computer?