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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

Henry Ford is reputed to have said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” He didn’t, [hbr.org] but that doesn’t change the truth of the aphorism: People don’t want something when they don’t know what it can do and how it will change their lives. It’s one reason that a lot of people are dubious about self-driving cars or autonomous vehicles (AVs) [treehugger.com], as noted in a J.D. Power study we covered recently, [treehugger.com] and now in a report from the The University of Michigan Sustainable Worldwide Transportation [umich.edu] gang, Brandon Schoettle and Michael Sivak.

Their latest study, Motorists' Preferences for Different Levels of Vehicle Automation:2016 [umich.edu] finds that people really don’t want completely self-driving cars. A whopping 95.2 percent of respondents wanted a self-driving car, even if it was totally capable, to still have have a steering wheel plus gas and brake pedals (or some other controls) to enable a driver to take control if desired, even though that is what some (like Google) have determined to be the worst of all possible worlds.

Everything hinges on branding. Call it a "Foreign Driver-free Taxi" and those reservations will melt away.

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