Poll: More than 70% of American voters say they wouldn’t use robotaxis or Tesla’s full self-driving tech
That sentiment holds across age, party, income, and geography.
Ahead of Tesla’s robotaxi rollout next month, market research firm Electric Vehicle Intelligence Report surveyed 8,000 American voters in May on their feelings regarding autonomous driving. While CEO Elon Musk says his self-driving car service is ready for public roads, the public doesn’t share that view.
Some 71% of consumers said they wouldn’t ride in a robotaxi and 43% said they should be illegal. Meanwhile, 77% said they wouldn’t use Tesla’s full self-driving technology and 48% believe that should be illegal, too.
Americans’ biggest concerns are the “lack of human judgment” and the absence of a person in case something goes wrong. Survey takers also don’t think the technology has been sufficiently tested — and they don’t want to be crash test dummies.
“Right now, autonomous driving is viewed as a tradeoff between inconvenience and safety, and safety is going to win that fight every time,” Evan Roth Smith, EVIR’s head of research, told Sherwood News. “Autonomous driving demos and promos frequently over-focus on the convenience factor, but it’s safety incidents that make the news and penetrate to consumers.”
In all, the share of those who were concerned by autonomous vehicles (67%) vastly outweighed the portion who are excited about the tech (18%).
For now, Tesla’s robotaxi program is expected to launch in Austin with just 10 to 20 cars and is by invite only — so the American public won’t really get to express its opinions in the form of taking these vehicles or not for some time. Meanwhile, Google’s side project Waymo is bringing in a quarter of a million paid rides per week (which is still far from mass market).
“You can call that an ‘early adoption curve’ if you like, but there’s a real risk that the market for this technology is far more limited than hoped,” Smith said. “The headwinds are certainly strong enough to doubt that Tesla or any other company should be staking its near- or medium-term prospects on robotaxi adoption.”
Musk, however, is betting they will in the future and staking Tesla’s success to that bet. “The future of the company is fundamentally based on large-scale autonomous cars,” Musk said on the company’s last earnings call.
“In the not-too-distant future, buying a gasoline car that is not autonomous, will be like riding a horse while using a flip phone,” he said. “Some people still do it, but it’s rare.”
Tesla’s not-too-distant future may have to focus on getting the public onboard for that to come true.
