Americans Are Starting To Realize Self-Driving Cars Aren't Just Around The Corner

Photo: Cruise

For years, it felt like no amount of screaming that Teslas couldn’t actually drive themselves would ever get through to regular people. They’d heard from their uncle or coworker or whoever that Teslas were self-driving, and trying to bring them back to reality just didn’t work. These days, though, things are a little different. The Drive reports that according to a recent Forbes Legal survey, most Americans are skeptical of self-driving claims and think true autonomy is a lot further in the future than some companies would like to claim.

Walter Isaacson On Elon Musk(s)

Of the 2,000 people surveyed, a whopping 93 percent of respondents said they were concerned with the safety of self-driving cars. Additionally, 61 percent said they wouldn’t trust their loved ones’ safety to a self-driving car, and 51 percent said they didn’t foresee themselves using a self-driving vehicle in the next five years. When it came to trusting a self-driving vehicle, 46 percent said they were somewhat or very distrustful, while 34 percent said they were somewhat or very trusting of the technology. Twenty percent didn’t have an opinion either way.

What’s especially interesting about the results of this survey is that it appears that a large percentage of those who were asked had their minds changed by Tesla’s recent recalls. Apparently, hearing that more than two million Teslas had been recalled, which ended up being nearly every Tesla ever sold in the U.S., didn’t exactly lead to people being more confident in Tesla’s autonomous claims and technology. In fact, 62 percent of those surveyed said they’d lost confidence in Tesla.

The good news is, despite self-driving cars still being decades away from going mainstream, companies have already invested more than $100 billion in not making it happen yet. Oh wait, that might be a bad thing. Oops.