🔥 Commentary: The precarious inevitability of AV acceptance

New data on attitudes about self-driving cars shows how interrelated our enthusiasm, trust and adoption of new technology can be

YouGov has released some interesting data on American attitudes towards autonomous vehicles (AVs).

Riding in an AV for the first time is a hell of a thing. For most people, it’s one of those rare moments with a new technology that truly inspires awe and encourages you to make a mental note of it— you immediately realize that your life now bridges a massive before-and-after moment for what it’s like to be a human navigating the modern world.

Here in San Francisco, where my kids and I take bets on how many Waymos we’ll see on the walk to school each morning, the enthusiasm for AVs is real. People (myself included) gladly pay a premium over the cost of an Uber for the comfort, reliability, and safety they provide over a human driver. Friends love taking them. They’re a tourist attraction. The Hard Fork guys clearly love them. People can’t wait to try the cute new Zoox AVs currently being tested in the SoMa district. It’s an AV lovefest.

But this data from YouGov is a cold bucket of water to dump on that unbounded enthusiasm of the Bay Area. Most Americans (58%) are not enthusiastic about the development of AVs. There are interesting generational, regional, and gender enthusiasm gaps observed in the data, too: older Americans, women, and those who live in rural areas are most skeptical of them.

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And it’s not just a lack of enthusiasm! The survey also included measures of “worry” about AV development that show similar patterns.

And there are certainly people who hate these things, even in San Francisco. My wife saw a guy standing in front of a Waymo in a crosswalk just the other day for seemingly no reason other than to make a statement. Public transit boosters question why we would encourage more cars at all instead of more buses or trains. Some are just distrustful of their safety. Some reporters seem hell bent on casting them as unsafe. There will surely always be a segment of the population that hates them for one reason or another.

But the YouGov data also shows signs that we’re likely in the early days of an emergent, widespread acceptance of a profoundly important new technology. Nearly all measures of acceptance and enthusiasm were up meaningfully in the survey over 2023.

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As a shift in technology skepticism, this seems to me to be a pretty steep trajectory over the course of just a year. And the trend tracks with the experience of anyone who has taken a ride in one with a skeptical friend or family member. I’ll never forget the reaction of my mother-in-law when we took her in her first Waymo ride: the journey she went on from mild nervousness to wonder to utter boredom lasted all of 30 seconds from when the car started moving. I imagine that will be a common experience. People will be nervous about these things until they take a ride in one and see how utterly banal the experience is. Only then will the revelations about their safety, comfort, and predictability make themselves clear.

Photo credit: Zoox

I’m reminded of when Google Street View was first released decades ago. There was backlash to the fact that images had been captured of people’s faces and placed on the internet in identifiable locations without their consent. Google eventually blurred human faces in Street View in response, but before it became clear that doing so was possible, a lot of technology observers and pundits were questioning the ethics of the product and wondering aloud if it would stay alive in the face of public or even governmental pressure. I had these questions myself, but a coworker quickly dismissed that skepticism with a line I’ll always remember: “Street View isn’t going anywhere; it’s just too amazing.”

Sometimes that’s true. And it’s not the capability of the technology on its own that’s too amazing to dismiss (though the technology is amazing). It’s the value that the technology delivers to people that’s too amazing. Society accepts these things over variable time horizons, but only when the value they deliver is more powerful than the downsides— real or perceived— that come along with them. Whether you’re talking predictability, road safety, passenger safety, comfort, pedestrian safety, or something else, the value AVs deliver is so profound that it’s hard to imagine the trends in this YouGov data doing anything other than continuing in the direction towards widespread acceptance.

Put another way: AVs aren’t going anywhere; they’re just too amazing.

Macro stories like this one, about people’s attitudes towards new technology, and micro stories, about the nitty gritty details of how they engage with them and why, are what I hope to track over time at The Understanders. There’s too much talk of new technology as interesting in and of itself— ooo, what can it do now??— and not enough talk about what those advances actually mean to people, how we’re using them, whether or not they are delivering on their promises. In the case of AVs, I can’t wait to see research that dives into many of the micro parts of this story, among them:

• How does the presence of AVs impact the behavior of human drivers around them on the road?

• How do passengers feel riding in AVs without traditional car configurations (like the forthcoming Zoox “toaster”, and presumably more models like it in the future)?

• To what extent to human drivers assign agency for AV behavior to their passengers?

• To what extent do AV passengers feel and assume agency for AV behaviors?