Self-Driving Cars Are Coming, But Are We Ready For Them?
Our cars are getting smarter and smarter: They may help you park or switch lanes, dictate directions if you need them, link up with your phone to play your calls and music or make sure you stop before it's too late.
As NPR's Sonari Glinton has reported, an average car already has millions of lines of code, and some recent research has shown that the technological offerings are the deciding factors in new car purchases. A new study by Autotrader found that 70 percent of shoppers preferred vehicles with autonomous features like park assist, collision avoidance and automatic braking.
This is a big shift in the industry and both the automakers and technology companies are racing to cash in. Companies like Google, Uber, Tesla, Ford, Lyft, Toyota, BMW and General Motors are striking partnerships and making plans to equip our cars with more autonomous features on the way toward a fully self-driving vehicle. Regulators are trying to stay abreast.
But what does the public think about autonomous cars? The University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute has been looking into this. In mid-2014, researchers there conducted a survey of public opinions in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.
Project manager Brandon Schoettle spoke to NPR's Ari Shapiro about the mixed messages that the public has been sending about self-driving cars.
You can listen to the audio above, and here are a few additional excerpts from their conversation.
Interview Highlights
On whether people want to own a self-driving car
We often get back a bit of a mixed message. In general, people are concerned about riding in these types of vehicles, but at the same time, they're also very interested in riding in and possibly owning one of these vehicles. As much as they have concerns, there's an interest there.
On details of his survey findings
We tried to make it very simple and ask people very straightforward questions: Do you want a self-driving vehicle; do you want no self-driving vehicle; and if you want self-driving, do you want it to do all or partial? ...
The largest single answer we got was that people don't want a self-driving vehicle. However, when you combine the responses we got for partially self-driving or completely self-driving, then a majority of people we talked to want some version of a self-driving vehicle. However, the completely self-driving type that would have no steering wheel, no gas or brake pedals was a much smaller percentage than either of the other two. So depending on how you look at it, you could say that the largest group don't want self-driving vehicles or, to put it another way, the majority do want a self-driving vehicle of some kind.
On the biggest concerns that people have
Of course, they're concerned that the vehicle might not do as good a job of driving as your average human driver, for example that it might get confused in situations where a human driver might figure things out a little more easily. They're also concerned about giving up control, every time you have to completely relinquish control to something like a self-driving vehicle, it's something that people aren't always that keen to do. And of course, you have some of the hard-core people who just simply like driving, has nothing to do whether or not the vehicle will drive better. They simply like driving their car and don't want a computer doing it for them.
On what automakers could do to get people more comfortable with self-driving cars
It's a matter of taking small steps and slowly proving what these vehicles can do, slowly introducing them to the public and giving the public a chance to not launch right into full-blown use of these vehicles but slowly see what they're capable of.
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Transcript
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
With all this talk about self-driving cars, we wondered - do people even want them? About 90 percent of people say they have some level of concern about self-driving cars. That's according to surveys by the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute. Brandon Schoettle is a project manager there, and he has been posing this survey annually. He says answers are a mixed bag.
BRANDON SCHOETTLE: The largest single answer we got was that people don't want a self-driving vehicle. However, when you combine the responses we got for partially self-driving or completely-self driving, then a majority of people we talked to want some version of a self-driving vehicle. In that survey, though, we also asked a question about concern for riding in self-driving vehicles. And we got, within one or two percentage points, the same exact answers we got in the survey we did the previous year. So the level of concern, it hasn't gotten any worse and it hasn't gotten any better. Though depending on how you look at it, there's much more interest in the self-driving vehicle that one can take control over versus the one that takes complete control away from the driver.
SHAPIRO: It seems a little surprising that as people learn more about self-driving vehicles, they're on the news more, that the numbers haven't changed much.
SCHOETTLE: Yeah, there's some competing forces. While every month that goes on you sort of see more and more of what these vehicles can do, there's also more discussion about some of the things they can't do. They kind of cancel each other out, and I think that's sort of left us with this - no change in the level of concerns.
SHAPIRO: What about the other side of the coin? When you look at people who are super enthusiastic about self-driving cars, what appeals to them about it?
SCHOETTLE: Well, of course there's the safety aspect. These vehicles - some people tell you as a bit of a criticism - they drive ultra-safe. As people, I think, in California who are used to seeing some of these vehicles around Mountain View will tell you, they're not a vehicle they necessarily want to be behind because it drives slower than your average driver, it drives more safely than the average driver. And this is the ultimate goal or promise of these vehicles - drastically improve safety over the average driver on the road.
SHAPIRO: States are wrestling with what the appropriate regulations are. For example, California's DMV has proposed a requirement that a licensed driver be able to take over a driverless car at any time. Do you have any suggestions for what states considering this issue should do?
SCHOETTLE: Well, this fits in with some suggestions we've made. We have a report that we put out where we discussed the idea of whether there should be some sort of licensing. And this is exactly the type of thing California suggested as part of their draft regulations. They've proposed a third-party testing take place for these vehicles. And basically what would happen is the manufacturers would state a claim about what it is the vehicle can or can't do, and a test would occur to actually prove whether that's the case. And anything that the vehicle's not able to handle at the current time would just have to be handled by the human driver. Down the road, possibly decades later, we can envision these vehicles driving around with nobody in them, going from one person to the next to pick them up. But as a first step, the requirement for a licensed driver makes sense to us.
SHAPIRO: That's Brandon Schoettle of the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute speaking with us from member station WUOM. Thanks for joining us.
SCHOETTLE: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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