Last year, one of the motoring organisations in Europe conducted several studies, asking drivers of all ages and backgrounds what their feelings were on self-driving cars. The general consensus was that nobody really wanted them, and at the time it was considered that it might be more appealing to the American market.
Skip forwards 8 months and now we have some inkling that US drivers might also not be that hot about the idea of self-driving cars. Michigan's Transportation Research Institute just published the results of a recent study in the US, and it turns out 70% of drivers pretty much don't want self-driving cars, and over 95% of them said that if self-driving cars are forced upon us, they wanted gas and brake pedals and steering wheels.
More to the point, in the light of recently published hacks against Chrysler vehicles - now ask yourself the question - do you want to be in a completely automated car? By necessity they'll be net-connected, meaning they'll be even larger hacking targets than existing vehicles.
If you've read this blog for any amount of time, you know my feelings on drone cars already.
Anyway - the Fortune article that talks about the TRI study can be found here : Most Americans want to put the brakes on self-driving cars
2 comments:
I guess it is a good thing that the so called "driver assistance" systems (e.g. lane keep assist, adaptive cruise control, automatic braking, automatic parking, and so on...) are currently sold as (mostly) expensive options when buying a new car.
You can (and will ;) ) skip most of them.
You do know that they introduce more and more of these systems just to let the drivers get used to releasing control and gaining trust in such systems, right?!
I know that's what the manufacturers want. Problem is once we have a generation of people who rely on the car and don't know how to drive themselves, what happens when the car fails (which they will) and reverts control to the passengers (because at that point, they're no longer a driver) ?
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