Though a newly released study by AAA found that Americans are slowly becoming a little tiny bit less afraid of riding in newfangled autonomous cars—which, of course, aren’t actually here yet—we still have miles to go before we’ll feel safe and happy falling asleep behind the wheel of these still-largely-fictional future-beasts. At the moment, 63 percent of Americans still aren’t down with the idea of letting a machine do the dirty work on the roads, the study found.
Of course, this likely has a great deal to do with the fact that consumers a) don’t have a lick of experience with autonomous cars and probably won’t for years to come, and b) have no earthly idea how these machines will do what they do when they do get here. Of course there’s going to be trepidation on a massive scale. Time will solve much of this problem—which, again, isn’t actually a problem yet—but the study nevertheless represents an opportunity to reflect on what will be necessary for us to get there, for humans to have faith in the mysterious robo-cars of tomorrow.
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