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While only a small percentage of drivers say they would be completely comfortable in a driverless car, a sizable amount would have no problem as long as they retain some control, according to a University of Michigan report.
Researchers Brandon Schoettle and Michael Sivak of the U-M Transportation Research Institute examined motorists' preferences for vehicle automation, including their overall concern about riding in self-driving cars.
They surveyed 505 licensed drivers and found about 44 percent prefer to retain full control while driving. Nearly 16 percent would rather ride in a completely self-driving vehicle, while almost 41 percent said they prefer a partially self-driving vehicle with only occasional control by the driver.
Male drivers and drivers under 45 are more likely to favor partially or completely self-driving vehicles, the researchers say.
"Self-driving vehicles are often discussed in regard to their potential safety, energy-consumption and environmental benefits, or the existing technical challenges that must be overcome for their successful implementation," Schoettle said. "However, less attention has been paid to considering the actual level of automation, if any, that drivers desire in their vehicle."
While about two-thirds of those surveyed said they are at least moderately concerned about riding in completely self-driving vehicles, that percentage drops to less than half for partially self-driving cars. Women and those 45 and older are more apt to have concerns with either level of automation. According to the U-M report, nearly all respondents (96 percent) would want to have a steering wheel and gas and brake pedals available in completely self-driving vehicles.
As for partially self-driving vehicles, 59 percent of those surveyed said they prefer a combination of three warning modes (sound, visual, vibration) to notify drivers when to take control of the vehicle. About 19 percent thought that sound and visuals would be enough.
Schoettle and Sivak defined the three levels of automation as:
- Completely self-driving: The vehicle will control all safety-critical functions, even allowing the vehicle to travel without a passenger if required.
- Partially self-driving: The driver will be able to hand over control of all safety-critical functions to the vehicle; only occasional control by the driver will be required.
- No self-driving: The driver will always be in complete control of all safety functions, but the driver will be assisted with various advanced technologies.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday July 25 2015, @07:24PM
The promise of autonomous is that the technology is just plain safer than human driving, even if a bug makes it through testing once and a while. Good drivers are killed on the roads all the time by bad drivers, other good drivers, and their own mistakes and human limitations. Any driver can just randomly encounter a deadly situation. With fully autonomous cars, the skill of the human in the car doesn't matter, and recovery/avoidance/reaction time is potentially better (which is why Google cars are getting rear ended a lot in live public tests).
The risk of being in the autonomous car added to the risk of being an early adopter or using a buggy version (like the Toyota mishap and others) should still be less than that of today's driving. And even if today's new cars weren't full of computerized and automatic functions, they still get recalled for mechanical defects that lead to deaths, like the biggest automotive recall in history [soylentnews.org] we reported on recently. So if you can believe the above, there is no special reason why you should wait until the technology is "[very extremely] thoroughly tested" before trusting your family's lives with it.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by schad on Sunday July 26 2015, @01:26AM
Yet still the overwhelmingly vast majority of drivers aren't killed on the roads. In order to have a 50% chance of dying in a car accident in your life, you need to drive over 45 million miles. In fact, the 50% chance for any kind of accident at all -- that's serious enough to get reported -- occurs at about 130k miles.
Show me a complex piece of software -- comparable in complexity to what self-driving cars will have to do -- which has such a low failure rate. The work of an airplane's autopilot is trivial by comparison. But even if you pretend it's not, do you actually believe the auto manufacturers would design cars to that level of quality? Do you think the government would require them to? Do you think anyone could afford a self-driving car that's been QA'ed like airplanes have been? (A couple hundred grand for QA on a $188 million airplane is a rounding error. Not so much for a family car.)