A Whopping 66% Of Drivers Are Afraid Of Self-Driving Vehicles: Survey

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The general polling of Americans can sometimes be depressing, but the number of my fellow driving citizens who either are afraid of or distrustful of self-driving vehicles seems appropriately high to me. Go America!

After a lot of complaining about California’s emissions regime, Stellantis has come to an agreement that likely allow it to start selling all its cars in all states again.

Hertz has also come to an agreement with its CEO Stephen Scherr, in that the company has agreed he wont work there anymore after a big bet on electric cars blew up in his face.

And, finally, Lotus is getting a bespoke program, because rich people love bespoke programs (maybe everyone loves bespoke programs, actually, but not everyone can afford them). It’s a humpday Morning Dump, let’s do it like Shock G.

Fear Of A Self-Driving Planet

AAA Chart
Chart: AAA

A huge number of drivers are unsure about self-driving cars (25%) or just outright don’t trust them (66%). Only 9% of drivers actually trust self-driving vehicles.

These numbers come via this survey by AAA, the roadside assistance company that also won’t stop asking me to sign up for freakin’ life insurance every three days (I might not renew, tbh, it’s getting bad).

Given all the coverage of crashes involving Teslas and general confusion on the part of robotaxis, it’s not a big surprise. Obviously, there are few true self-driving cars on the roads, so some people are just afraid of the unfamiliar. This is one of those occasions, though, where I think the Overton Window is just about as open as it needs to be.

I say this because we are far from what is true full self-driving in most situations, but there are numerous Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) that are helpful safety additions to vehicles. The good news, according to this same study, is that people seem interested in these helpful features:

Chart of interest in semi-autonomous featuers
Chart: AAA

It’s interesting that only 48% of people are ok with adaptive cruise control given that these are common systems on vehicles that probably get used at a high percentage.

Stellantis And California Reach Emissions Deal

2023 Jeep Wagoneer L And Grand W

Stellantis has been causing all kinds of issues for its dealers, refusing to ship certain vehicles to California and a handful of other populous states that follow California’s emissions guidance unless directly ordered.

That’s probably coming to an end as the State of California, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and Stellantis have a deal in place that’ll see Stellantis voluntarily agreeing to CARB’s guidelines.

Here’s the buoyant press release from Stellantis with the positively spun headline: Stellantis and California Partner to Drive Carbon Emissions Reduction Efforts.

I love this formulation. This morning, my daughter and I partnered on school lateness reduction efforts (barely).

So what’s Stellantis gotta say about all this?

As part of the agreement with CARB, Stellantis pledged to expand its ongoing commitment to strengthen its electrification offensive through educational efforts for U.S. consumers and dealers on the benefits of electric vehicles (EV). This includes collaborating with Veloz, the leader in promoting EV awareness efforts, providing discounted EVs to organizations in disadvantaged communities, building upon ongoing efforts and contributing an additional $10 million for the installation of public EV chargers.

“Together, we have found a win-win solution that is good for the customer and good for the planet,” said Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares. “This agreement will avoid 10 to 12 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions over the lifetime of the agreement and will also allow our U.S. customers to fully benefit from our advanced technologies, including five plug-in hybrids and two pure electric vehicles. We remain as determined as ever to offer sustainable options across our brand portfolio and being a leader in the global decarbonization efforts.”

“This partnership with Stellantis will help California achieve our ambitious goals to drastically cut pollution and get more clean cars on the roads,” said California Governor Gavin Newsom. “The biggest and most influential companies in the world understand that this is how we can fight climate change together, and it’s another example of the private sector joining California to help millions of people get into clean vehicles.”

Tavares/Newsom 2028!

Hertz CEO Falls On EV Sword

A white Polestar 2 parked next to a Hertz rental agency sign.
Photo credit: Polestar

The car rental business seems like a shaky one to me, dependent on a bunch of factors that rental agencies can’t control (used car values, disposable income of travelers).

Hertz, in particular, tried to make a big show of buying a bunch of Teslas as it launched its post-COVID bankruptcy IPO. It worked for a brief second before the reality of how hard that would be became apparent and a new CEO, Stephen Scherr, was left trying to make it work.

It didn’t work. Hertz ended up buying a bunch of Teslas at the height of the market when the vehicles were the most expensive, which meant that Elon Musk’s constant price-slashing devalued this huge asset when Hertz decided to sell most of its fleet. That’s not really Hertz’s fault.

While good due diligence should have prevailed here, the fact that EVs are more expensive to fix and take longer to fix isn’t precisely Hertz’s fault (the company told investors the repair costs were about double ICE cars), though it is its problem.

The rest of the issues? Those are more Hertz’s fault. Even before the pandemic, when I was renting cars almost every week for work, the quality of Hertz’s services felt like they were slipping. The fact that the charging rules were prohibitive and the lack of chargers in some markets were an issue seems like something Hertz should have figured out ahead of time.

From CNN:

“The execution and marketing of EV’s [by Hertz] was a horror show across the board,” said Daniel Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities who follows the EV market. “It’s a black eye they couldn’t recover from.”

Part of the problem for Hertz was that even people who might want to buy an EV wouldn’t necessarily want to rent one while on the road, when they don’t necessarily have the ability to plug them in to charge them as they would at a private home. There might not be a charging station, or enough time, for a rental car customer to charge an EV, Ives said.

By hewing to charging rules the way Hertz has enforced refueling rules, it may have dissuaded customers from wanting to rent an electric car. Without building any charging infrastructure at its rental locations, Hertz may have hurt its own business.

So, Scherr is gone, even if it the idea for the Hertz deal was actually from former Ford CEO Mark Fields.

Lotus Chapman Bespoke Is Now A Thing

Lotus Chapman Bespoke Eletra

Luxury and sports car automakers like Porsche and Bentley have made obscene money from customers who want their Bentayga or 911 or whatever to exactly match their desires.

Here’s an example of a Porsche bespoke color:

(I actually worked on this video a little, which was fun).

Lotus is now getting in on the business, launching in China in April and then hitting the rest of the world soon. While Porsche calls it Porsche Exclusive, Lotus is calling it Lotus Chapman Bespoke:

With Bespoke, there are three levels of personalisation and customisation to choose from:

  1. Tailor-made: choose your own unique combination from within a broad palate of colours and designs, and finish with exclusive personal touches and details.
  2. Collection: choose from a selection of limited-edition designs, bought to life in partnership with partners, artists and likeminded luxury brands.
  3. One-off: As the name suggests, build a car as unique as you are.

I can’t wait to see what people come up with as I love bespoke/custom cars.

What I’m Jamming To While Making TMD

This came on the radio! My daughter was like “Whaaat is this?” And I was like “We’re late, but this is going to get us to school on time, trust me.” Soul Coughing is so weird.

The Big Question

We’ve got an AAA survey here, so my question is: Do you subscribe to any roadside assistance program?

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140 thoughts on “A Whopping 66% Of Drivers Are Afraid Of Self-Driving Vehicles: Survey

  1. So, old triple-A can’t even spell ‘braking’ correctly? That’s downright shameful.
    Unless, of course, they’re talking about some of the old shitboxes I have had: they definitely did have Automatic Emergency (and Everyday) Breaking.

  2. There were a lot of stories of Hertz giving drivers Teslas that were at a pretty low charge. I’ve never gotten a rental vehicle that didn’t have a full tank of gas. The fact that they bought these vehicles without considering the surrounding infrastructure, or investing in their own, is so incredibly stupid. That level of blatant stupidity should undermine the common assumption that CEOs are some kind of super geniuses that are worthy of 500x the pay of their average worker. And yet …

  3. “ We’ve got an AAA survey here”

    Though technically correct, this hurts my brain due to the common pronunciation associated with AAA.

    1. I don’t think it is technically correct. According to what I was taught, you chose a/an based on the pronunciation of the acronym, not the first letter. So it’s “An NSA surveillance project” not “A NSA” because the first sound of NSA is “en”. NASA would be the opposite since you do pronounce the N normally in that case. Since it’s always pronounced “Triple A” I would argue it should be “a” here.

  4. Soul Coughing really should have gotten more radio play. Circles was arguably one of the weakest songs on El Oso, and it’s the only song some people ever heard from that album. And it really felt like Super Bon Bon disappeared from the radio after the brief initial push.

    Maybe it was different on the East Coast, but at least the Seattle radio stations did them dirty.

  5. I accidentally cancelled my roadside assistance once, when I added a vehicle to my insurance and they decided I must want to change my current vehicle to match. I then blew out a tire for the first time in a vehicle with no spare.

    So, yeah, roadside assistance through my insurance for sure. I was so frustrated to find out that it was cancelled on my daily because I didn’t need it on my pickup.

  6. I’ve got roadside assistance through my insurer, it’s come in handy a few times over the years. I guess I’m in the “don’t trust” camp for autonomous vehicles. These things don’t seem like they are ready for prime time yet. It’s weird to trust all of the crappy drivers around me everyday, but they are at least more predictable to me than a confused machine.

    1. As a trucker, I live by the mantra “Everyone is an idiot and will do stupid stuff, so expect it.” It has served me well for 12 years, and yes, stupidity is predictable. I can tell you if someone is going to do an exit ramp cutoff dive before they reach the middle of the trailer or hang on my back corner forever, then pass and slow down right in front of me. Now self driving, all bets are off. Tesla Autopilot throws me for a loop when one is around me. Those cars do all sorts of weird things, then I look down and see the driver is in his own world, not paying attention. So yes, I see your point.

  7. Soul Coughing is so weird.

    Pretty sure I heard Super Bon Bon in the Amazon Reacher series soundtrack, so maybe that’s why its getting play on the radio today, ~25 years after its initial release.

    1. It figures prominently in S2E7 “The Man Goes Through”, which incidentally is a pretty good ELI5 description of the eponymous character’s obstacle-tackling strategy

  8. I’m so jealous of kids who haven’t heard soul coughing yet. So much wonderful music to discover! (Actually, in general… not just with SC.)

  9. Stellantis’ business philosophy seems to be to intentionally drive away as many customers as humanly possible through a lack of decent product and stupid pricing backed up with a communications strategy best summed up by the phrase “all hat, no cattle”. They may as well just change their slogan to “YOLO, Bitchesssss!” at this point.

  10. Rental EVs are terrible for several reasons, all of which were easily foreseen.

    The rental must be fully charged when you hand it off so the renter does not need to go find a charger. Hertz failed this one.If a renter returns the car discharged, turnaround time is slow, impacting the next renter.Rental EVs will always be fast charged which degrades the batteries.EV use requires a learning curve for finding and using chargers. Renters do not want to sit and read a manual. They want to go somewhere.The Hertz CEO deserves what he got.

    1. The fast charging thing is important- a lot of people are getting excited about picking up a low mileage used Tesla as Hertz dumps their fleet, but you do have to keep in mind that a rental car was probably only fast charged throughout its entire service life, so the battery has seen more wear and tear than a privately owned car with the same miles, and Hertz isn’t really discounting all that much vs equivalent non-rentals.

    2. I got a Tesla as a “Manager’s Choice” when I was looking for a cheap rental in Cleveland. They said they’d bring it around for me, so as I sat there thinking through the logistics…”Mom’s house is about a seventy mile round trip, I don’t want to download any apps so I’ll bring it back with whatever juice is left and if they want to charge me, so be it..” the clerk called me back up to the desk and said the wait would be too long (I suspect it was plugged in to that same extension cord powering her dot matrix) so here’s an Explorer for the same price. I really wanted to try the Tesla, but I really REALLY wanted to get the hell out of there.

    3. > fast charged which degrades the batteries

      It turns out this is not true, at least for Teslas. A study by Recurrent compared the battery health of 12,500 Model 3 and Ys. “The results show no statistically significant difference in range degradation between Teslas that fast charge more than 90% of the time and those that fast charge less than 10% of the time,” 

      1. From the same article. They don’t seem too convinced by their own study.

        “It’s still difficult to quantify precisely how much routine fast charging affects battery health long term – 5, 10, 20 years – but it’s fine in small doses.”

        1. From what I understand, the concern with fast charging is the heat generated when cramming all those watts into the battery. If the EV has decent thermal management and you aren’t consistently using DCFC in 100 degree heat or 0 degree cold then it’s probably not an issue over the lifetime of the car.

  11. I subscribe to AAA for the camper towing coverage. The likely time I’d use it would be on a camping trip. Regular AAA doesn’t cover the camper attached to the tow vehicle. Most of my trips are within 200 miles of home so getting a covered tow home would be great.

    The most recent time I used AAA was when my RAV4 ate its water pump 10 minutes from home last fall. The tow company flat-bedded it to my house and I fixed it that weekend.

  12. Wait, so Hertz was charging EV renters extra $$$ for not bringing the EVs back fully charged? I mean, I sort of get it for the gas cars, they don’t want to have to drive an empty car down the block and fill it up and bring it back so they charge an outrageous amount per gallon to encourage you to bring it back full, but an EV they could just plug in on their lot and let it slowly charge up before the next customer comes in.

    Hertz used to be my go-to for business and vacation car rentals but this was pre-pandi. I haven’t had a need to rent a car for years and all the news stories of them calling the cops on their customers the past few years would make me consider how much I really needed to rent a car.

    1. I think some of the charge is justified by their turnover practices; if they’ve got a customer coming in two hours, there mighn’t be time to Level 2 that car back to 100% while vacuuming it before sending it right out the door.

      And separately but possibly related: my post-pandi experience has been that Hertz and their partners have been overbooking, leading to massive lines and in multiple cases empty counters with no notice other than a sign saying “we have no cars, sorry.” Maybe this is because their EVs are still juicing up, maybe it’s something else.

      We’ve started using Turo. Seems sketchy (like “ignore the check engine light” sketchy), but we haven’t been burned/stranded yet.

      1. I guess I can throw out my Hertz gold/platinum/special membership now 😉 I’ve thought about Turo, seems like it’d be a more interesting experience if I can find a replica A-Team van to rent or something. That’d certainly be more fun than another 4door white anonymous fleet vehicle.

        1. I looked into Truro last year, but all the fees and insurance made it more expensive than the corporate alternatives. I ended up going with SIXT and getting a free upgrade to a BMW.

          I was just trying to rent a small SUV, if I were looking to rent something unique it would have been more worth it.

          My buddy rented a first gen Taco in Denver a few years back when we were going to Moab, we met the guy at the airport, then had to drive him home, then on the return we had to pick him up on our way back to the airport. That put us in traffic, and we almost missed our flight.

    2. The big problem is that Hertz didn’t install chargers at their sites, or at least not enough of them at enough sites, so returning a car with a low battery charge wasn’t much different than with an empty tank, a Hertz employee had to drive it off-site to the closest charging station, and wait with it while it charged up (and if the car was really low, they had to plug it into a regular wall outlet until it got just high enough to make it to the charging station). They couldn’t have cars sitting around trickle charging on extension cords from regular outlets, that would keep the vehicles out of service for too long between customers

    3. I last rented from Hertz back in 2015, and it was a tedious process then. I last rented from Sixt in San Diego, and it was fantastic. Instead of the bait and switch Hertz pulled on me, I ended up in a BMW rather than the RAV4 I had reserved.

      1. Hertz was always pretty good for me with the gold club or whatever they called it. As long as you reserved in advance the shuttle from the airport would drop you off in front of a giant board with names on it, find your name and the space located and just walk to your car and drive out. The person at the exit gate scanned your paperwork real quick and you were on your way. It was the most painless experience I found from the different rental agencies.

        1. I did get dropped off like that by the shuttle, if I recall correctly, it was basically “pick any car in this row”. It was a line of Chevy Cruze’s; I picked a blue one and checked out with the dude at the gate.

          The problem was the check in process, I waited over an hour in the line, then had to go through the hard sell of upgrades, insurance, etc. I had reserved a “Focus or similar”, and they tried to put me in an Aveo. I was not driving around LA in one of those, so after some back and forth I ended up with the Cruze.

          With SIXT, the I went to the desk, no line, no hard sell on anything, and was offered the BMW X2 for the same rate as the RAV. It was right there, just an escalator ride away from the parking garage. We were in and out in no time.

          1. To be fair, when I used Hertz several times a year up until Covid, it was the same as your SIXT experience. LAX, BOS, ATL, and EWR. I would arrive, go to a row and pick any car, drive away. When I returned I just parked in the return line and walked away. I never had any problems.

    4. Right now if you have T-Mobile you can return an EV for no charge regardless of juice left. Also, they offer Dollar Rental returns with no fill up for free and 10% off gas from Shell.

      1. I had to search it quick to confirm because I had the same debate lol. It seemed like 2 had more music on its soundtrack but that could be confirmation bias since I played that one more and had the CD I mentioned.

  13. Word choice matters in surveys. “Afraid” is not the same as “skeptical”, but here we are, with those two words being conflated. Given the options the AAA survey used, “afraid”, “unsure”, or “trust”, I wouldn’t be able to respond because none of those options describe how I – and probably a lot of people – feel about self-driving vehicles. When they present their next chart based on the data from the first chart, “afraid” becomes “skeptical”. Call me skeptical, but if I didn’t know any better I’d think the AAA was trying to dismiss the 2/3rds of respondents who are more likely skeptical of self-driving vehicles by labeling them as “afraid”.

    Sloppy work by the AAA.

    1. I agree. I also they think should have clarified how people feel about self-driving vehicles compared to how people feel about human drivers. You can be afraid/skeptical of self-driving vehicles and have an even WORSE opinion of humans.

  14. My employer provides me free AAA, but I’ve never used it.

    As for being afraid of self-driving cars, the only relevant question should be whether you are more or less afraid of them than the worst of your fellow drivers. If that were the question, I suspect the percentages might be different.

    1. It’s the combined incompetence of a not-ready system paired with a clueless operator.

      I don’t know if that is Incompetence * 2 or Incompetence^2, either way it is not an improvement. It’s like a very loud amplifier connected to a very bad musician.

      1. I interpreted the question as a truly driverless vehicle, something that only exists in robotaxis or the potential future, not Tesla autopilot or any other system that involves a “clueless operator”.

        But the confusion surrounding the definitions used is yet another reason to find the results questionable.

    2. But, I’m still trusting humans—worst of all, I’m trusting programmers to come up with appropriate algorithms to handle every situation a car can encounter, which is a Sisyphean task even for someone of keen intellect and instinctive understanding of the product’s use, which judging by my experience with much simpler devices with far more predictable uses, are the complete opposite qualifiers that I would use for the typical programmer.

  15. Why does AAA try to sell me life insurance by sending me sheets of return address labels? Who needs return address labels?

    How old do they think I am? (I am still paying for AAA so they may just assume.)

    1. I have a multiple lifetime supply of return address labels thanks to people sending them to me unsolicited. I use maybe a couple a year when I need to send paperwork somewhere, and even that is happening less and less often as more things get digitized.

  16. 66% is still concerningly low in my opinion, and the 9% that trusts Self Driving cars is terrifying.

    ADAS right now is terrible. Level 2 and 2.5 type systems are deeply flawed. They lull drivers into a false sense of security, while a level 4 will actually do what people THINK a level 2 system does, and L4 is not commercially available at any price.

    the fact that 1 in every 11 drivers on the road would trust a self driving car as is today, is a scary thought. 18 year old gets his parents hand-me-down Model 3 with FSD, cruising at 75 completely unaware on Instagram. Parents, stressed out using ADAS to drive while they deal with little Timmy in the back seat for 2 minutes. This is bad. But the marketing has made people feel comfortable doing objectively dangerous things because “it hasn’t failed yet so it’ll be fine”

    And the worst part, is a functional L2-2.5 ADAS system seems like a good and attentive driver to other motorists, right up until it disengages and misbehaves. It’s not like a battered Altima lane surfing a 20 over the speed limit where you know to get out of the way, there’s no way to tell when these systems are driving, or the actual driver is. It’s bad, and 2/3 of the population being scared is a great start, but caution needs to be preached far and wide, and the marketing needs to be reeled in significantly.

  17. You mean the rolling surveillance machines that drive like a confused elderly person?

    No. I don’t like or trust them.

    Suffering from slight dementia behind the wheel is not a demographic I think we need more of on the roads.

  18. I’ve got roadside assistance baked into my car insurance policy. But for most roadside issues, I have a subscription to a a service called “the emergency tool and fluids kit tucked into the spare wheel well.”

  19. My parents have me on their AAA subscription but I’ve only used it once. I guess they have the cheapest plan because when I needed it to get my car towed approximately 20 miles back home, AAA only covered a few miles and I ended up needing to pay almost $200 out of pocket to cover the rest.

    1. I don’t know the exact plan or details, but I remember my BiL trying to use AAA and it seemed like they barely covered anything anymore. It used to be that you only had to be a passenger in a broken down car and they’d cover some reasonable distance tow, but now there are all kinds of restrictions and it’s not cheap. I was also told by one tow truck guy that AAA dispatch is usually a lot longer as their compensation sucks or something to that effect, so they get pushed toward the bottom of lists. I figure for the small number of times I’ve needed a tow, paying the extra couple dollars for the coverage on my insurance or out of pocket has put me way ahead and gotten me on my way faster.

    2. The last time I used AAA was when my FR-S’s engine ate itself and I needed a 7 mile tow to the dealership. It took them 3 hours to get to me. If not for a hill, I would have been able to see the towing company they dispatched from where I was stranded.

      That was about 8 years ago, and my wife had probably been paying for years before that. We would have been better off just paying for that tow truck out of pocket.

    3. That’s horrible, the one time I needed a 14mi tow I called two tow companies, the cheaper one was $100 flatbed, arrived in 10 minutes done. Good thing you aren’t paying for AAA, bad cotomer sevis.

  20. That is a fantastic (!) road trip album. Fun stuff. Too bad Mike Doughty is such a dick.

    Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t everyone get roadside assistance for free now? It’s not like you gotta be some fancy pants Diners Club credit card holder anymore or anything…

      1. I’m just saying you can get AAA for free from basically any credit card, among many other ways. Shit, I can get it free for just having T-Mobile. I think that it just doesn’t occur to people to look for it in things they already pay for.

        1. Now that you mention it, my CC probably does include that. I get a bunch of other stuff with it, so it would make sense, but I never bothered to check into it. Damn, I can probably knock $12 off my insurance!

    1. Personally I’m not interested in Automatic Emergency Breaking but frequently my cars have other ideas. On the other hand, the idea of Reverse Automatic Emergency Breaking has a certain appeal.

      1. Chapman was involved in that (not the drug end, but a different DeLorean scandal). Had he not died (or . . . did he?), he would have been facing some serious charges in the UK involving millions of government money that was given for DeLorean to set up his factory in Ireland so the UK could tout job creation there. Lotus had done development work for DMC and there was apparently poor accounting as to where all of that money went. I can’t recall the exact details as I read that stuff a couple decades ago.

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