Most people expect driverless cars to become common, worry about it
Most Americans think autonomous cars will be quite common within 15 years, though 74 percent of people say they don’t expect to have one and two-thirds say they wouldn’t want to walk or ride a bicycle anywhere near one.
Confusing? That’s in part because the results come from three different recent surveys on Americans’ attitudes toward autonomous cars.
Taken together, however, they underscore widespread misgivings about the autonomous vehicles that people expect will be among them shortly, the challenge that automakers face in marketing them, and a need for safety reassurances from federal regulators.
Most Americans — 70 percent, according to an HNTB Corp. survey released Monday — have softened to the idea that driverless cars factor in their future, whether they plan to ride in one or not.
Developments that portend the future of autonomous cars came in a double dose last week. First, a prominent technology investment firm — SoftBank Vision Fund — promised to invest $2.25 billion in General Motors’ autonomous vehicle operation. Then Fiat Chrysler Automobiles announced it would provide “up to 62,000” Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivans to Waymo, the pioneering autonomous-car company.
With several dozen companies working to develop autonomous cars or put them on the road, the vehicles’ presence is inevitable. But before the cars “become commonplace within 15 years,” as the HNTB survey says, a massive change in attitude will be necessary.
“Some of the things that popped out at me in all [three surveys] was that the majority of people are currently unwilling to ride in an automated vehicle,” said Jim Barbaresso, who leads the Intelligent Transportation Systems Practice at HNTB, an infrastructure solutions firm.
In the HNTB survey, 55 percent of people said they wouldn’t ride in an autonomous vehicle. A survey last month by AAA put that number at 73 percent, and one by the group Consumer Watchdog that came out three days later had nearly the same result at 74 percent.
When AAA’s report came out, Greg Brannon, the group’s director of engineering, made what may be a key point: “Any incident involving an autonomous vehicle is likely to shake consumer trust, which is a critical component to the widespread acceptance of autonomous vehicles.”
A simple reading of recent headlines might explain the misgivings.
Uber pulled its test autonomous cars from service after one of its vehicles struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, in March. A Waymo test vehicle with a human at the wheel crashed when another motorist swerved into it last month, also in Arizona. When Tesla’s vehicles in driver-assist mode have crashed, the technology has been confused with fully autonomous cars, creating bulletins such as “Tesla driver dies in first fatal autonomous car crash.” And when a truck backed into a self-driving bus in Las Vegas in November, a headline said, “Las Vegas’ self-driving bus crashes in first hour of service.”
After several blasts of negative publicity, AAA found that the number of millennials who said they were unwilling to ride in a driverless car had increased from 49 percent at the end of 2017 to 64 percent last month, and that overall, nearly threequarters of the people they quizzed said they wouldn’t drive one.