Fewer and Fewer People Want Self-Driving Cars. Because We are Stupid.

Source – Fewer Americans are embracing self-driving car technology following high-profile incidents involving Uber and Tesla vehicles, according to a new study from Cox Automotive.

Consumers’ interest in automatic braking and other autonomous features is high, but drivers view self-driving cars as less safe compared to a similar survey conducted two years ago. Forty-nine percent of respondents said they would never own a fully-autonomous car, known in the industry as a Level 5 vehicle. Two years ago, 30 percent said they would never buy one.

Meanwhile, a majority of people (63 percent) believed in 2016 that roadways would be safer if all vehicles were fully autonomous. That number has dropped to 45 percent.

So now we’re down to less than half of us believe self-driving cars are safe and the number is dropping all the time? I can’t say I’m surprised. Not because they are inherently dangerous. But because in general, people are timid ignoramuses. Because they think satellite-guided autonomous cars are this:

Because we are hard-wired to have self-confidence, not want to give up control, and to believe that we are smarter, more capable and have better judgement than even our best technology. Especially when that technology is new.

Well, you were going to have to hear this sometime. So it might as well come from an aging manchild writing on a sports/entertainment/lifestyle humor site. You are not smarter. You are incapable. Your judgement blows. In 20 years, being against robot cars is going to be looked at like the people who thought photographs took a piece of your soul or God didn’t want us flying planes.

Look, I’ve enjoyed a healthy dose of technophobia a time or two. I’m no fan of watching Boston Dynamics make robots that walk like humans or hear about machines making other machines. Because I can totally see a Terminator-like future coming. But on the highways, our present is much worse. It’s fucking Fury Road.

You literally can’t make the round trip commute out of any city for a week straight without traffic having to crawl its way around at least a half dozen accidents. I’m like those 63 percent who thinks I’m a better driver than any machine. I thought that as I crawled up to a red light, glanced at my phone to see which right hand turn Google maps was telling me to take and crushed my front end in like the dope that I am. And I’m still convinced I’m a safer driver than 99.9 percent of you.

This sounds apocryphal, but I swear on my children’s eyes it’s true: A couple of years ago I was on the expressway out of Boston, and the guy to my left in the Zipper Lane with both hands off the wheel, texting. At about 50 mph. And he was driving a motorcycle. I know a guy who drives a big rig and says a day doesn’t go by that he doesn’t look down into the car next to him and at least once catch a guy driving along with his dong in his hands. If you’d rather trust your safety to your fellow human beings, myself included, you’re a Luddite who might as well just buy a horse buggy and go raise a barn by hand someplace. That is, until someone goes slamming into your buggy because he’s eating a sub, sending texts, changing his radio station and jerking himself off. I personally want those morons, and you, and me, as far away from the wheel as possible and I’ll take my chance with the best software developers, engineers and scientists we have. We’ll all be safter. Plus it will keep them from designing the robots who will destroy our cities and enslave us all. Win/win.