There are several companies trying to be the first to have their self-driving cars available to the public. While we are still a few years away from seeing this yet, a study by Deloitte in 17 countries of 22,000 found that most people simply don’t trust the companies that are trying to develop the cars.
With all of the recalls on millions of automobiles over the last few years, it was surprising to learn that 47 percent of those surveyed said that traditional car manufacturers would be the ones that they would trust to develop self-driving vehicles. A third of those surveyed did say that a new company would be trusted.
The big tech companies, like Google and Apple did not fare so well during the survey. In fact, only 20 percent said a tech company would be trusted.
Another part of the survey dealt with whether people used services like Lyft or Uber. Seventy-seven percent said they never or rarely use services like that. The report, however, stated, that this might be because those services are more popular in cities instead of suburban areas.
Part of the reason why people are hesitant to trust developers of self-driving cars is because they haven’t been able to interact with such a vehicle before. Google’s Waymo and Uber have both had the public involved by demo-ing autonomous cars. The goal is to help start getting the public to support these vehicles.
The vehicles will certainly come with many legal questions, such as who is responsible if a self-driving car is in a fatal accident — the manufacturer or the person who programmed the vehicle. Many similar questions will need to be addressed before self-driving cars will populate driveways across the country.
Source: Business Insider, “Google and Apple have a huge disadvantage in the self-driving car race — here’s why,” Danielle Muoio, May 11, 2017
