Americans Turn Their Backs on Self-Driving Cars

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Americans Turn Their Backs on Self-Driving Cars

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Americans have little interest in self-driving cars. The information is a blow to a major transformation of the automobile industry. Manufacturers expect that autonomous vehicles, along with electric cars, are the wave of the future. Most have major programs to prepare for a future in which millions of these vehicles will be sold each year.

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Partners for Automated Vehicle Education conducted a survey of 1,200 people taken between February 27 and March 5.

Among the primary findings:

  • Nearly three in four Americans say AV technology is “not ready for primetime.”
  • 48% of Americans say they “would never get in a taxi or ride-share vehicle that was being driven autonomously.”
  • 58% think safe AVs will be available in ten years, and 20% believe they will never be safe.
  • Only 34% of Americans think “the advantages of AVs outweigh any potential disadvantages.”
  • Only 18% of Americans agree with the statement “if there was a website to get on a waiting list for the first AV, I’d put my name down.”

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Self-driving cars have drawn hundreds of millions of dollars in investment. Some of this is from manufacturers like Tesla and General Motors. Other investments have come from tech companies like Alphabet’s Waymo.

It turns out that many of these investments will not bear fruit for a very long time.

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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