People Are Losing Faith In Self-Driving Cars Following Recent Fatal Crashes (mashable.com)

oldgraybeard shares a report from Mashable: A new survey (PDF) released Tuesday by the American Automobile Association found that 73 percent of American drivers are scared to ride in an autonomous vehicle. That figure is up 10 percent from the end of last year. The millennial demographic has been the most affected, according to the survey of more than 1,000 drivers. From that age group, 64 percent said they're too afraid to ride in an autonomous vehicle, up from 49 percent -- making it the biggest increase of any age group surveyed. "There are news articles about the trust levels in self-driving cars going down," writes oldgraybeard. "As a technical person, I have always thought the road to driverless cars would be longer than most were talking about. What are your thoughts? As an individual with eye problems, I do like the idea. But technology is not as good as some think."

The Mashable article also references a separate study from market research company Morning Consult "showing increased fear about self-driving vehicles following the deadly March crashes in the Bay Area and Arizona." Another survey from car shopping site CarGurus set to be released Wednesday found that car owners aren't quite ready to trade their conventional vehicles for self-driving ones. "Some 84 percent of the 1,873 U.S. car owners surveyed in April said they were unlikely to own a self-driving car in the next five years," reports Mashable. "79 percent of respondents said they were not excited about the new technology."

Comments

The right question

[Pascal Sartoretti]

The right question to ask is : would you prefer to ride in a self-driven car, or with a drunken driver ? and with a very tired driver ?

Re: The choice is still clear. Self driving

[Rei]

Yes, because as we all know, airplane autopilots are totally designed to replace a pilot, and that's why we don't have pilots anymore.

Meanwhile, it's not Tesla that's calling its cars "self-driving".

The system of cars on roads is completely broken

[lordlod]

We climb in a little metal box, hurtle towards another metal box at a closing speed of 200km/hr. Then, to make it safe, we paint a white line on the road and promise to both stay on one side of it. To make life exciting we then add wildlife, children playing, wet weather, tired alcoholics who have just broken up with their wives...

The system is absurd, it is mind blowing that it works as well as it does, but all the band aids like crumple zones, seatbelts and AI steering can't avoid the fact that the system we have evolved is inherently dangerous. Nobody would ever deliberately design a system like our roads and cars.

As an illustration, where I live people working on the side of the road must have a substantial crash barrier to protect them from the oncoming traffic and provide a safe working environment. That same worker can then get on a motorbike and ride home, protected only by a painted line, and nobody thinks anything of it.

Re:The choice is still clear. Self driving

[Anonymous Coward]

You're forgetting that self-driving companies are also pushing sensationalist headlines all the time saying self-driving cars *must* be done so we can reduce fatalities. But in the process all I see is that we are producing exceptionally bad, inattentive drivers (and will so even more than people simply using their phone and driving), making more hazardous conditions. I've seen really bad inattentive drivers the last couple years, and I can't help it is the generation coming that have been addicted to "smart" phones, not knowing what it is like to drive without a connected device on you.

So if you think this marketing is beneficial and will save lives, bow down to your electronic god. Or you can take it from me who works in the industry and even know all the "smart-car" developers admit behind closed doors the technology doesn't actually work and they don't think it will be possible for a long time, and I might add, if ever, since the concept of having people behind the wheel not knowing how to drive, relying on the car to figure it out all the time, and /will/ fail (BSOD will take a new meaning). This dumbing down will not solve anything.

Re: Amazing

[vtcodger]

Conceptually intervehicle communication is a terrific ideal And there's a standard of sort (V2V). Problem is the edge cases where one thinks one is communicating with vehicle A which you think is going to let you make a turn across traffic. But Vehicle A is not the car you think it is. Vehicle B -- which you have mistaken for A is moving toward you at speed and has no intention of letting you make a turn. Oooops.

That has a Wile E. Coyote problem.

[Brannon]

I should't be able to steer your car into a rock face by painting a QR code on it.

We can't build AI that relies on special signs or road markings or vehicle-to-vehicle communication. That's a terribly brittle approach, and way too easy to maliciously or accidentally defeat.

We need to build AI that relies on sensing its environment and behaving safely in all situations, including by pulling over and handing control over to a human when it gets confused.