The Terminator inconsistency...

Don't blame the Terminator. He is just following the script presented to him by James Cameron

Lol@ millsey. Perhaps because of his hand damage he couldn't work a gun. But Ibthiught about that also.

It was time for Wapner

id say he has some sort of lay low programming, although the disco scene and the assault on the police precent seems to contradict this.

Maybe he is programmed so if there is a good chance he can complete his mission he will take the risk and engage openly. News of an invincible man murdering police soon would have brought on the attention of the various US secret services and military, who did have weaponry that could have taken him out. T1 took place over what a week?

I think you're right in that it doesn't make sense. He seems to retreat because his arm is damaged, but he could have used his other arm since he wields dual weaponry.
Others contend that his sights were also damaged BUT he only notices that his outer human eye is damaged upon inspecting himself in the mirror...

I've also pointed out this other seeming inconsistentcy before: Kyle and Reese confining themselves inside a factory to escape the limping Exo-skeletal Terminator. They could have just kept running...unless the stop-motion was making it appear slower than it was..If not then having them confined inside a factory was entirely motivated by an effort to evoke horror movie tension without regard to logic.

Two possible explanations:

1) He was damaged. His arm may have been inoperable at that point and required repairs, and his human eye was a mess and probably making it impossible for his robot eye to see, so he had to remove the human eyeball.

2) He still didn't know what kind of weaponry the police had at this point in time. Remember earlier in the day he had asked the gun shop owner if he had a plasma rifle. As far as he knew they had enough fire power to further damage him and make him unable to complete his mission.

Yeah, this is one of the things that bothers me, too, and always has.

There are SO many things wrong with this, it boggles my mind.

1) Why does a MACHINE, a computer, a CPU, an artificial intelligence, designed to operate in the three-dimensional world smoothly and flawlessly, make a stupid mistake like 'estimating its speed vs. the wall' wrong?

2) If it doesn't estimate the speed and wall's distance wrong, but crashes because it's 'distracted', that makes even less sense. Surely a computer like this can keep 'one eye' on the road/operating a vehicle, while doing other tasks simultaneously, even if it requires pre-emptive multitasking? Come on, an intelligent computer shouldn't ever get distracted! We've been told it doesn't feel pity, remorse or fear, but it somehow can be distracted or startled because the other car slows down at the last second so the machine has no time to react or slow down?

I mean, it can't have 'bad reflexes', it shouldn't be able to be fooled like that - a human driver could be cocky enough to think that as long as the other car keeps driving, I will also be OK. But a computer would have spotted the wall long before the human (look at how much better and faster Tesla cars break than human drivers! Heck, those autopilot cars have 'saved' many lives already!), and had made a sub-routine or some kind of plans to deal with it, REGARDLESS of what the other car is doing!

A dopey drunk driver might think, "duhhrrh, that other car is driving, so I won't break, either, ooh, now it is breaking, too late for mee, durrr"-CRASH!

But a CPU? A computer? WHAATT?! After seeing ALL the things it can flawlessly do in the three-dimensional reality, this part just doesn't compute!

Another part that really bugs me is when the terminator says 'I'll be back' and then comes back by car. It crashes through the doors and crushes the cop that doesn't have self-preserving instinct or any kind of intuition.

We're shown the cop's face LIGHT UP..

That's just a horror movie cliché, deal with it.

Then again, it IS really stupid and illogical, but there are similar inconsistencies throughout the movie. First the robot tries to negotiate with people, and only murders them after they assault it (though it should've had faster movements due to not having reflexes or lag, so no one should ever be able to stab it, even Bruce Lee wouldn't have been fast enough against someone that functions in the world of microseconds), but then it stops murdering people and just throws them around a bit (the phone booth scene), then it verbally confirms things first (gun shop, first Sarah murder we're shown), then it goes to full rampage mode without confirming if the victim is Sarah or not and so on and so forth - it decides to waste time by throwing Matt around instead of killing it with one punch, strangle or gunshot, and SO ON)..

This movie is FULL of inconsistencies and you only talk about one?