"And all the drivers are above average."
From Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge, May 15:
With all the advances in autonomous vehicle technology, why aren't self-driving cars chauffeuring more people around? Research by Julian De Freitas, Stuti Agarwal, and colleagues reveals a simple psychological barrier: Drivers are overconfident about their own abilities, so they resist handing over the wheel.
Think you’re a better driver than most people? You’re not alone. And you may be one reason self-driving cars haven’t taken off.
About 77 percent of participants surveyed in a new study rated themselves superior to automated vehicles, while 60 percent thought other people were worse. Drivers’ egos may be bridling widespread acceptance of automation, says Julian De Freitas, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and one of the authors of the piece forthcoming in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.
“We find people are OK with some level of automation but prefer higher levels of automation for others than themselves,” De Freitas says. “This is because they think that they are better at driving than increasingly automated systems. We believe this creates a barrier to adoption.”
“Whether people utilize automated vehicles is not just a matter of how they view the technology in a vacuum, but it's how they view it in relation to themselves.”The pursuit of vehicle automation isn’t just a technological or financial quest by automakers, it’s an urgent public safety issue. Worldwide, traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for people ages 2 through 59, with some 98 percent of accidents tied to human error. And accidents cost $340 billion, or 1.6 percent, of US Gross Domestic Product in 2023, according to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
But automating cars meets sticky psychological resistance on the part of drivers:
“Whether people utilize automated vehicles is not just a matter of how they view the technology in a vacuum, but it's how they view it in relation to themselves,” says De Freitas, who is also director of HBS’s Ethical Intelligence Lab and focuses on how humans interact with self-driving vehicles (pdf) and other AI tools....
....MUCH MORE
Autonomous vehicles really do get challenged by all the humans driving and walking and rolling in their wheelchairs.
