The Guardian recently ran a piece entitled, “Self-driving cars: safe, reliable — but a challenging sell for Google“:
The strongest case for self-driving cars is safety, its logical, programmed movement also means vehicles can be centrally controlled, rerouting traffic away from congestion. Since the project started in 2009, Google has driven most of its 1.2m hours of tests in a small fleet of customised Lexus autonomous cars. As of July this year, there had been 14 accidents but all had been caused by human error, not by the software. Around 33,000 people die in traffic accidents in the US every year; Google says self-driving cars will reduce that number significantly. The opportunities are, indisputably, immense.
The hard sell for Google will be winning over generations of people who feel safer being in control of their vehicle, don’t know or care enough about the technology, or who simply enjoy driving. Yet most people who try a demo say the same thing: how quickly the self-driving car feels normal, and safe. As the head of public policy quipped, “perhaps we just need to do demos for 7 billion people”. Google’s systems engineer Jaime Waydo helped put self-driving cars on Mars while she worked at Nasa; it may well be that regulation and public policy prove easier there than on Earth.
I think the article gets the sale wrong. While safety may be important for regulators, I am doubtful that it will be an important sell for consumers, at least initially.
Early adopters tend to be people who have an overwhelming interest in technology, or a strong need for the product to solve a specific pain point. Safety is rarely a pain point until it’s too late.
I think the strongest case for self-driving cars will be helping people who place a lot of value on mobility but either cannot drive or place a high negative value on the act of driving. That will be caregivers, companies that don’t want to pay drivers, and commuters.
And that’s a pretty huge market.
Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on October 6, 2015.
David Silver 