If you are like a lot of people in Illinois, you may be watching how many vehicle manufacturers and technology companies are racing to get fully autonomous vehicles on the roads and wondering just how ready consumers really are. One might assume that consumers are becoming more comfortable with these vehicles but a newly completed survey by AAA suggests the opposite is actually true.
A report in Gizmodo shows that roughly two years ago at the beginning of 2017, 78 percent of people said they would have been too scared to be a passenger in a fully self-driving car. By the end of that year, trust seemed to increase as only 63 percent of people said they were too afraid of riding in an autonomous vehicle. Instead of that trend continuing, the latest survey shows that now the number of consumers scared of being passengers in these vehicles has increased eight percent to 71 percent.
Interestingly, some people indicated they would feel comfortable with self-driving vehicles being used for applications like delivering food that may not necessarily require a human to be in the car. However, even these uses would put autonomous cars on the roads with other vehicles, pedestrians and motorcyclists which continues to put people in positions in which they could be harmed or even killed, like the pedestrian in Arizona last year.
This information is not intended to provide legal advice but is instead meant to let residents in Illinois learn and understand how Americans, in general, are responding to the growing development of autonomous vehicles.