Safety features outrank self-driving cars: survey
Rear cameras, blind-spot indicators
Once you work past the big noise around autonomous vehicles, what is it that consumers actually want?
According to a recent Consumer Reports survey, it’s not autonomous features, but safety ones. Headlines might lead you to believe it’s all about the autopilot, but instead, it’s all about the rear-view cameras. The top two innovations that consumers want on their new or used vehicles are those cameras (51 per cent) and blindspot warning indicators (45 per cent).
The survey unearthed some unsurprising findings: people still want to drive their own cars, and still believe they can do it better than technology that is still in the proving stages.
An industry consultant cited in the survey results noted owners can get easily disenchanted with false positive warnings, saying “There’s definitely a case to be made that systems that are supposed to assist but don’t do it consistently and quickly become more of an annoyance more than anything else.”
Which means there is a little chicken-or-the-egg thing going on. We don’t trust what we don’t know, but we can’t adopt it if we won’t try it.
For those two top technologies buyers do trust, that trust is well-founded. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety notes that “blindspot warning can reduce crashes by 14 per cent, and rear-view cameras can reduce crashes by 17 per cent.”
Technology and the car industry may be changing at every increasing speeds, but consumers will always vote with their wallets. And for now, that means they want increased vision around their vehicles — and their hands on the wheel.