American Automobile Association survey finds 73% of American drivers would be too afraid to ride in an autonomous vehicle, up from 63% last year
Context & Ripple Effects
Fear of self-driving cars was already measurable before this survey: a Pew Research poll in late 2017 found 56% of US adults wouldn't ride in a driverless car. AAA's new number — 73%, up ten points in a year — shows that wariness deepening during the exact period when Uber and Tesla were pushing their systems hardest in public.
That timing matters because commentators had already argued that Uber and Tesla's recklessness in developing autonomous cars risked alienating a skeptical public. The AAA jump reads as the first hard survey evidence of that backlash landing.
First-order effects
- Tesla and Uber, the two deployers named in the related coverage, face a widening gap between what they ship and what drivers will accept — every high-profile incident now moves a headline trust metric against them.
Second-order effects
- The trust problem cuts both ways for partial systems: an IIHS survey later finds majorities of Super Cruise and Autopilot users treating driver-assistance as fully self-driving, so the same companies must simultaneously calm the afraid and re-educate the overconfident.
Third-order effects
- The pattern holds into later polling: by Gallup's follow-up, more Americans expect driverless cars to become common but ownership intent sits unchanged at 19% — awareness grows while willingness stalls, making trust, not technology, the binding constraint.
The trend: Public trust in autonomous vehicles is decoupling from industry deployment pace, with survey-measured fear becoming the metric that gates adoption.