What will it take for us to trust self-driving cars?
There’s a scene in the 2019 Child’s Play remake in which an elderly woman has her first experience in an autonomous car. Naturally, being a horror movie and all, everything goes terribly wrong – the car gets hacked by a killer Bluetooth-enabled doll (yes, that really happens!) and the woman winds up dead.
As farcical as that scene is it does play into to a very real concern around self-driving cars – consumer fear. It won’t matter if we reach full Level 5 autonomy if people are afraid to get into the cars. Even now, years – perhaps decades – before we’ll actually see a fully autonomous car on a public road, people are already concerned about how safe the vehicles are.