And here I thought I was the only guy in Silicon Valley reluctant to hand my life over to an autonomous vehicle.
As it turns out, I’m not as paranoid as I thought. Others, according to a Morning Consult poll released Monday, are just as spooked as I am by the thought of barrelling along a highway with no hands on the wheel.
In a blog post, authors Amir Nasr and Fawn Johnson say that carmakers realize “it will take time for consumers to grow comfortable with the idea of driverless cars. People are wary of ceding all control to a vehicle, and therefore some of the features that allow the driver to completely ignore the task of driving won’t be available for some time.”
Can you blame them for being wary? I can’t. While I once test-drove a car that could park itself, and frankly found the experience exhilarating, the vehicle in question was moving at about one-half-a-mile-an-hour into an empty spot on a quiet side street in San Francisco, not hurtling along at 65 on Interstate 880 surrounded on all sides by insane drivers.
So let’s get to the poll numbers:
New Morning Consult polling data backs up the marketers’ suspicions. Americans aren’t ready to ride in cars that completely drive themselves. In the poll, 43 percent of registered voters said autonomous cars are not safe. About one-third (32 percent) said they are safe, but that’s not much more than the 25 percent who said they didn’t know or didn’t care.
Voters were similarly unsure if they would ride in a driverless car. Fifty-one percent said they would not, and the other half said they would (25 percent) or didn’t know or care (24 percent).
And yes, the survey did confirm your very astute suspicion that younger people are more willing to use a driverless car than older people are – 45 percent of 18-to-29 year olds said they thought the technology was safe, while only 25 percent of people over the age of 65 said the same.
But doesn’t that also just prove that youth is wasted on the young?
Of course, the aversion to driverless technology revealed in this poll could evaporate over time as people begin to see autonomous vehicles beside them on the road (something already happening in Mountain View and other places where Google has been testing a fleet of its autonomous cars for years now).
As Google puts it on their driverless-car site:
We’ve self-driven over 1 million miles and are currently out on the streets of Mountain View, CA, Austin, TX and Kirkland, WA. Our testing fleet includes both modified Lexus SUVs and new prototype vehicles that are designed from the ground up to be fully self-driving. There are safety drivers aboard all vehicles for now. We look forward to learning how the community perceives and interacts with us, and uncovering situations that are unique to a fully self-driving vehicle.
But while Google may be gung-ho on the idea, many of us are more conflicted. In other words, we are the ones in the jury and the jury’s still out.
Morning Consult’s data also hinted that people are unlikely to change their minds any time soon. Almost two-thirds (63 percent) said they are unlikely to buy or lease a car with self-driving features within the next 10 years. Only 23 percent said they were likely to buy such a car, and 13 percent said they didn’t know.
Credit: Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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