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Many People Still Don't Want To Ride in Self-driving Cars, Survey Finds (cnbc.com)
A lot of people may still have serious reservations about riding in fully autonomous vehicles, a new survey from Gartner indicates. From a report: The Gartner Consumer Trends in Automotive people surveyed about 1,500 people in the United States and Germany from April through May, and found that 55 percent of the people they spoke to would not ride in a fully autonomous car. However, just over 70 percent would ride in a car that was partially autonomous. Gartner defined partially autonomous vehicles as those that could drive autonomously, but allow a driver to retake control of the car if needed. Advocates of autonomous driving have said the technology will actually make driving safer, since statistics indicate human behavior is the major cause of most auto crashes. But many consumers familiar with the tendency of other electronic devices to sometimes malfunction or perform erratically still seem to have trouble accepting the idea of being held in a vehicle that could fail.
Yep, I once built an unsupervised learning algorithm for discovering vulnerabilities in a network topology. It was always over 95% accurate with most errors being false positives. When I wrote it ten years ago nobody wanted it. Now they are all over it and very little of that code has changed since. The security admins just came around.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
I would bet that this is common for new technologies. I remember the early 1990s when a lot of people didn't like the idea of carrying a cell phone. I remember in the 2000s, few people saw the value of smartphones. I knew several people who weren't sure about Netflix streaming, and thought the idea of cord-cutting was absurd. A lot of those people have now cancelled their cable. Of course people are unsure about self-driving cars. Give it enough time for them to be common, and to have a proven safety record. The results of that survey will change.
I just remember that video from the first pre-alpha test with non-project Google employees where the guy goes rummaging through his backpack for a charger or something for the longest time while the car is speeding down the highway. That's when they figured the path to full autonomy is not through taking away more and more responsibilities, either the car is driving or you are. Presumably it was a huge fan of the project to volunteer but it took only hours or possibly even less from being handed an extremely experimental system to blindly trusting it with his life.
To be honest, in low speed driving I'm more concerned about liability and hurting soft targets than personal danger. With all the crumble zones, airbags, seat belt and so on a crash could get expensive and pedestrians, cyclists, bikers etc. might get hurt but I'm unlikely to sustain any major injury to myself. I know a friend of mine who "only" cracked a rib in a pretty solid crash but the car was a wreck. Also traffic tickets of various kinds. So daily commute that is mostly trickling my way through 20-30 mph zones with traffic slowing it down further? No doubt the car is driving the moment I can let it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Most people who answered this question have no knowledge allowing them to make an informed decision on this question. A good portion of them have never even thought about the question. Some of them weren't even sure what an autonomous vehicle is.
All of these people came up with an opinion, because it was asked of them on the spot. This is the kind of opinion that will change when the wind changes.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I would trust autonomous driving in a setting if most if not all other cars are autonomous
That is specious reasoning. As a nerd you should use the scientific method: Instead of going with your gut feeling, you should trust SDCs when the evidence shows they are safer than HDCs. Until that evidence exists, it is highly unlikely that they will be available to the general public.