Americans Remain Wary Of Self-Driving Vehicles

We have talked about electric vehicles on this show. We see a few of those around this area. Something we don’t see much in this area is self driving cars, but other parts of the country, especially in big cities have seen quite a few of them on the road. That might change according to a new survey. The AAA has released its annual autonomous vehicle survey and according to it, most drivers in the US are not too keen on having a car that drives itself. The survey shows that 66% of Americans surveyed are afraid of fully self-driving vehicles. 25% are not sure how they feel about them, while just 9% trust a self driven vehicle. This is virtually unchanged from last year’s survey where 68% were afraid of self driven vehicles and 9% trusted them. Opinions about self driving vehicles has changed from a few years ago when just 54% of Americans were afraid of those vehicles in 2021.

Despite people’s unease of self-driving cars, interest in advanced driver assistance systems remains high. AAA’s survey found that almost two-thirds of U.S. drivers would want Reverse Automatic Emergency Braking (65%), Automatic Emergency Braking (63%), or Lane Keeping Assistance (62%) on their next vehicle. However as far as reverse automatic braking, recent AAA research found that Reverse AEB systems prevented a collision in only 1 of 40 test runs in scenarios involving a subject vehicle crossing behind the test vehicle and only 10 out of 20 test runs with a child target behind the test vehicle.

The survey was conducted January 11-16, 2024, using a probability-based panel designed to be representative of the U.S. household population overall