It s a good question for the 21st Century: If you were in a car that was driving itself, what would you be doing?
That, in so many words, is what market- and investment-research firm Intelligentsia Research asked more than 500 U.S. consumers in May and June.
The top answer? Lazing about and blabbering to friends.
Lest you lose faith in humanity at the idea of 89 percent of people wishing to squander the gift of free time on socializing when they could be bettering themselves, the earth, or humanity, take consolation in the fact that about half of respondents want to do something productive such as reading, sending texts or emails, or searching the web, Intelligentsia s paywalled report said.
For the sake of our outlook on Homo sapiens americanus we ll assume that those respondents were not envisioning themselves texting, emailing and web-searching about the Kardashians or Grumpy Cat 2.0.
However, the survey results may suggest to Google and other makers of self-driving cars an important feature: dimmable windows. No, that s not for sleeping. The survey s question about what people would do in the cars, that Intelligentsia hadn t asked them about, drew several responses from people who said they d be having sex. It was a surprise to see it mentioned so many times across demographic groups, the report said.
Speaking of Google, the survey suggested the firm lacks a degree of public trust in its self-driving technology, even though Google is leading the way on the technology. When respondents were asked which companies they d trust to provide safe robot cars, Tesla came first, followed by Toyota and Apple, with Google coming in at No. 7, just ahead of Volvo.
Photo: A Google self-driving car in Mountain View (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
The post What will people do in self-driving cars of Google and others? appeared first on SiliconBeat.
