Consumers Are Very Confused About Self-Driving Cars, Study Shows

People are very confused about self-driving cars, a new study has somewhat unsurprisingly concluded.

News about autonomous cars has been flooding the public consciousness and it only seems to be making the problem worse by confusing people even more.

Recently, CARiD conducted a consumer survey that polled more than 1,000 participants to get a deeper look into how consumers really feel about this new driving technology. These participants had varied backgrounds in regards to income level, gender, age, and geographic region.

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In regards to awareness about the definition of autonomous driving, the results were split with 48 percent of the respondents correctly identifying the meaning of an autonomous vehicle and a close 52 percent still believing a fully autonomous vehicle involves some human intervention behind the wheel. These consumers may be having a hard time differentiating between what makes a vehicle semi-autonomous and what makes another fully autonomous — the sometimes unclear jargon used by automakers could be partly to blame.

Should we eventually become a fully autonomous driving society, a staggering 71 percent of the respondents said they would miss the act of driving.

One thing that is a major concern for consumers is the role the government is playing in the development plans for self-driving cars. Sixty-six percent of the respondents think that the U.S. government must be involved in regulating autonomous vehicles compared to the 34 percent who are just fine leaving the automakers to sort things out with the way the technology should be handled.

Despite promises from proponents of self-driving cars who believe driving safety will be significantly enhanced by the introduction of fully autonomous driving, that insistence on government intervention may suggest the public may not yet be ready to place all their faith on automakers. These automakers may have the best interests of consumers at heart, but the critical work of getting consumers on board with hard evidence of increased safety records has not yet been accomplished.

Richard Reina, product training director for CARiD, says that fully self-driving cars are a long way out. “A fully realized self-driving world is pretty much still far off the horizon,” he says. “To get consumers to embrace this technology more, a lot more of work has to be done to convince consumers that this technology will be a sure thing to improve driving for the better.”