Why People Might Not Opt For Self-Driving Cars Over Human Chauffeurs

If you build it, they will come.

Maybe yes, maybe no.

In the field-of-dreams efforts underway to create true self-driving cars, a key assumption by nearly everyone is that people will flock to using driverless cars.

It seems perhaps blatantly obvious that anyone with half a brain will choose to use an AI-driven self-driving car in lieu of preferring a cranky, emotionally laden, fallible and (maybe) smelly human driver to drive them around.

Imagine, there you are, standing on a downtown street corner, aiming to use your mobile app to request a ridesharing lift.

You’ve had a long day at work and want to sit quietly in a car that will drive you home.

Upon pulling up the app, there is a choice offered to select either a ride that is a driverless car versus being able to choose a car driven by Avery Smith (a driver that is unknown to you, other than they have a high Yelp-like rating as a driver).

Which would you choose?

Assume for the moment that all else is equal about the driving aspects, except for the fact that one car is being driven by an AI system while the other choice is a car being driven by a human. Pretend that the cost is the same, the driving performance is the same, the level of driving safety is the same, and so on.

I realize those are rather gigantic assumptions, which I’ll break somewhat later herein, but go with me for now about this thought-provoking scenario.

If you are exhausted after a day of interacting with people at work, you might be tempted to use the driverless car. There won’t be a human driver at the wheel that will try to find out how your day was or ask what your hobbies might be, or perhaps try to annoyingly entertain you with banter about the weather.

In a self-driving car, it’s just you and the AI.

Similar to an Alexa or Siri, you can pretty much tell the AI where you want to go, and if the AI starts to pepper you with cute stories or other Natural Language Processing (NLP) interaction, you can curtly instruct it to shut-up.

Sure, you can tell a human driver to likewise shut their mouth, though in the back of your mind there is a hint of concern that doing so could upset the driver.

Might an upset driver become a riled-up driver?

Could a riled-up driver be more likely to make a mistake while driving you home?

Could the human driver go completely nuts and drive you and the car into a ditch, doing so merely because, well, because the driver lost their mind and opted to call it quits on this earth?

Yes, those are the potential adverse outcomes whenever you get into a car and have someone else (another person) driving the car.

You are at the mercy of the human driver.

Some people claim that if they noticed a human driver veering out of control, it would be a simple matter to reach over to the steering wheel and abruptly take over the car.

Really?

This might happen in movies, but I dare say that anyone attempting to take control of a car from a human driver is going to have a difficult time doing so and most likely will incur a deadly result. Plus, if you are seated in the backseat of the car, you’d need to be a human contortionist and have the speed of an Olympian to get into the front seat and grasp the driving controls before all heck broke loose.

This certainly seems to suggest that you’d be prudent to select the driverless car over the human-driven car.

It’s also partially why there is such a strong belief and assumption that once true self-driving cars become available; people will flock to using them.

Here’s then the shocking news for you: There’s a chance that people might not flock to driverless cars.

Why does that matter?

The automakers and tech firms are spending billions upon billions of dollars to try and accomplish the moonshot-like goal of achieving true self-driving cars. Right now, those efforts are funded almost entirely via R&D dollars that are flowing out the door, non-stop, bleeding profusely, one might say, and there isn’t any noticeable incoming revenue to match the tremendous costs being incurred.

Suppose the vaunted self-driving car is indeed built and fielded yet suppose further that the ridership is spotty.

I’m not saying there won’t be any ridership and instead suggesting that the ridership might be less than entirely fulfilling. Rather than the base assumption that every minute of every self-driving car is going to involve toting around passengers, imagine that riders were opting to sometimes use a driverless car and sometimes use instead a human-driven ridesharing car.

Yikes, those automakers and tech firms could lose their shirts!

After all their tireless efforts, and upon pouring vast amounts of monies into the presumed pot-of-gold investment, if the income is only a trickle and people are not obsessed with using a driverless car, the result could be financially devastating, possibly inducing bankruptcy for some that heroically persevered and pioneered us into a world of self-driving cars.

But, you protest, isn’t it apparent that people will undeniably flock to self-driving cars?

Can’t we put aside any qualms of that one-in-a-zillion chance that a few of the unwashed might cling to using human-driven cars over adopting the use of AI-driven cars?

There’s always some Luddites that won’t leverage new tech, and as such, it is tempting to accede to the notion that a tiny segment of society won’t use driverless cars, becoming like those that insisted on using a horse and buggy when automobiles came on the scene.

Let’s unpack the matter.

The Levels Of Self-Driving Cars

It is important to clarify what I mean when referring to true self-driving cars.

True self-driving cars are ones that the AI drives the car entirely on its own and there isn’t any human assistance during the driving task.

These driverless cars are considered a Level 4 and Level 5, while a car that requires a human driver to co-share the driving effort is usually considered at a Level 2 or Level 3. The cars that co-share the driving task are described as being semi-autonomous, and typically contain a variety of automated add-on’s that are referred to as ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems).

There is not yet a true self-driving car at Level 5, which we don’t yet even know if this will be possible to achieve, and nor how long it will take to get there.

Meanwhile, the Level 4 efforts are gradually trying to get some traction by undergoing very narrow and selective public roadway trials, though there is controversy over whether this testing should be allowed per se (we are all life-or-death guinea pigs in an experiment taking place on our highways and byways, some point out).

Since the semi-autonomous cars require a human driver, such cars aren’t particularly significant to the question of ridership in true self-driving cars. There is essentially no difference between using a Level 2 or Level 3 versus a conventional car when it comes to providing a ridesharing service.

It is notable to point out that in spite of those idiots that keep posting videos of themselves falling asleep at the wheel of a Level 2 or Level 3 car, do not be misled into believing that you can take away your attention from the driving task while driving a semi-autonomous car.

You are the responsible party for the driving actions of the car, regardless of how much automation might be tossed into a Level 2 or Level 3.

Choosing The Type Of Driver

For Level 4 and Level 5 self-driving cars, you are going to have a disembodied AI system that will be your chauffeur.

In theory, the AI system won’t get drunk and won’t get weary while driving a car. This is considered a cornerstone of the rationale for pursuing true self-driving cars.

No more drunk drivers, at least via AI-driven self-driving cars.

No more human fallible drivers that snap and opt to drive into a roadside barrier.

Human judgment and human prerogatives will go out the window and driverless cars won’t get angry, they won’t be thinking about the ballgame they are missing due to driving people around to make some dough, and they won’t turn their heads to talk with you in the backseat (potentially a human driver might do so, failing to then notice a double-parked truck that they are about to slam into).

Let’s splash some reality though into the Utopian beliefs about the advent of self-driving cars.

First, true self-driving cars are not going to miraculously appear overnight and suddenly replace all conventional cars.

There are 250 million conventional cars in the United States alone, and they aren’t going anywhere soon. The economic cost to discard all those conventional cars is astronomical. The cost and effort to produce and field self-driving cars are going to be huge, meaning that driverless cars will incrementally and progressively emerge, though at a likely gradual pace.

All in all, you should expect that there will be a mixture of human-driven cars and self-driving cars and that gradually and slowly an increasing number of self-driving cars will appear on our roadways, yet for a lengthy and enduring period of time they will both exist on our streets (there’s also an open question about whether human driving will ever be completely eliminated).

The significance of this undeniable mixture will be that driverless cars are still going to get into car accidents, often involving a human-driven car that rear-ends a self-driving car or a driverless car that rams into a human-driven car that swerved directly into the path of the AI-driven vehicle.

Therefore, you are not somehow attaining absolute driving safety by selecting a true self-driving car.

The risks of a driverless car getting into an accident will not be zero, of which there are some pundits that keep saying we are headed to a zero fatalities world due to the advent of driverless cars. I’ve said repeatedly it is a zero chance of attaining zero fatalities.

Even if we were to wave a magic wand and do away with all human-driven cars, you’d still have those pesky human pedestrians that can decide to dart in front of a moving car. A driverless car cannot overcome the law of physics. If a human opts to leap into the street and there was no means to earlier enough detect the impulsive action, a human fatality is likely to be produced.

This then takes us to a quite crucial factor in your choice of a human-driven car versus a driverless car.

Safety.

Is it safer to take a driverless car that might regrettably get intertwined with a human-driven car, and be caught unawares during the driving act, or might a human driver have done a better job at anticipating the actions of other human drivers and avoided the car accident altogether?

When I earlier said that you were to assume that the safety capabilities of a self-driving car and a human-driven car were equal, this is a yet ascertained element or factor.

We already know and accept the idea that human drivers differ in their safeness of driving a car. Not only does one human sometimes drive more safely than another one, your safeness can vary every time that you get behind a wheel.

If you are well-rested and feeling good, perhaps you are a fully attentive driver. Stayed up late last night and you just got word that you were fired at work, well, you might be a rather bad driver for the remainder of that day.

Despite our collective realization that human drivers vary significantly in their safeness, we shrug this off and get onto the roadways.

In the case of self-driving cars, I’ll put aside the numerous ways in which they can falter or fail, including that there might be hidden bugs or errors, there might be a computer virus implanted, etc.

Those are all possibilities and therefore you’ll ultimately need to weigh those aspects into your decision about choosing to ride in a self-driving car.

I’m trying to momentarily simplify the matter to provide a focus on what seems like the most paramount of considerations.

Making A Choice Over And Over

Returning to the general notion of safeness, I hope you can see that driverless cars won’t be enwrapped in a supernatural cloak of safety.

As you stand there on a downtown street corner and try to decide which car to request for your ride home, you will be torn between using the driverless car, which has some advantages over human-driven cars, versus using the human-driven car (which has some advantages over driverless cars).

To clarify, each has various advantages and disadvantages in comparison to each other.

In short, there isn’t a slam dunk and outright obvious answer to which you would or should choose.

That’s why the automakers and tech firms are currently sitting on a bit of a razor’s edge.

If they build it, meaning the building of true self-driving cars, will people indeed use those driverless cars?

I’m already acknowledged herein that people will undoubtedly use driverless cars, but the unknown is how many people will do so, and how frequently they will do so.

You’ve stepped out of a bar and it is past midnight. Not wanting to deal with a human driver, you select a driverless car. You aren’t especially thinking about which is safer in any driving sense, and instead, you are considering that the driverless car omits the hassle of a human driver that might rankle you about being drunk.

Somewhat cloudy minded due to partially being inebriated, you nonetheless logically choose the self-driving car.

Consider a different situation.

You are going to send your kids to school and cannot drive them there, so you decide to use a ridesharing service.

Having a human driver would mean there is a chance that the adult driver might (let’s hope not!) mess with your kids, so you decide to take a chance instead of the driverless car. You realize that the kids being alone in a self-driving car has its own downsides, but at least you’ve taken the adult driver out of the equation.

These are various realistic situations wherein people might select a self-driving car over using a human-driven car.

Let’s look at the other side of the coin.

You are in a hurry and need to get to your destination as rapidly as possible.

Those quaint driverless cars that you’ve used before are programmed to be legally abiding, acting squeaky clean while driving on public streets and byways. A human driver is bound to cut corners and drive you at a hurried pace, especially if you offer them a hefty tip.

So, you opt to go with the human driver.

Makes sense.

Consider another example.

You haven’t been feeling well and you fell and hurt your leg recently.

It is difficult for you to get around. If you choose a self-driving car, you’ll need to get into it on your own. You’ve found in the past that when a human-driven car pulls up to your house, the human driver realizes that you are limping and oftentimes gets out of the car to help you into the car.

Best to go ahead and choose the human driver as your selection for the ridesharing service.

These kinds of use cases are aplenty.

We don’t know how much of the time that people will choose the driverless car versus the human-driven car.

Automakers and tech firms could be surprised to find that people aren’t flocking to the use of driverless cars.

Whoever owns the driverless cars might also be shocked.

Suppose that a company buys a fleet of driverless cars and puts them into use. This company doesn’t have any human-driven cars in its fleet and has decided that driverless cars are the way to go.

Another company is using human drivers for its fleet.

I ask you; which company stands to make more money?

If you yell out voraciously that it will be the company with the driverless cars, I’d say you might want to reread the commentary herein. No such guarantee exists.

Should firms have a mixture of driverless cars and human-driven cars in their fleets?

Maybe, though it all depends upon a myriad of factors.

Let’s consider some of those factors.

Wrapping Up On The Choice

Will the price that you pay as a passenger when using a driverless car be the same as the price that you would pay for the use of a human-driven car?

Nobody knows.

I earlier pretended that as a base assumption the costs were the same for both a self-driving car and a human-driven car, so let’s now undo that assumption.

You are standing on the street corner, looking at your mobile app, and the price for the driverless car is (let’s say) more than the human-driven car, so which do you choose?

Alternatively, you look at your mobile app and the price of the human-driven car is higher than the driverless car, so which do you choose?

Another factor could be the timing and availability elements.

The nearest driverless car is ten minutes away from you, while a human-driven car is two minutes away from you.

Which do you choose?

On and on we can go.

There are many characteristics and considerations that will go into your mental calculus about whether to choose the use of a self-driving car versus a human-driven car.

Toss out the false imagery of driverless cars all cruising around in abundance and serving as your only choice.

Instead, passengers are going to weigh their options between using a driverless car versus a human-driven car and make their choices, moment to moment, depending upon what seems best at the time of their making such a choice.

Automakers and tech firms that assume an assured “build it and they will come” are setting themselves up for a bit of a disappointment, along with quite arduous challenges after we cross that bridge.

If we can get to the end of the rainbow and actually produce true self-driving cars, will they turn out to be profitable?

For now, please keep seeing those rings of gold and remain hopeful that driverless cars will mint money.