What Will it Take for Self-Driving Cars to Become the New Norm?

Are you tired of fighting traffic and spending your days behind the wheel? If self-driving cars become more common, you could ride to your destination as a passenger in your own car, as the autonomous function in the car does all the work for you. However, there timeline for the introduction of self-driving cars to the market and the embrace of them as the new normal still seems a long way away. What will it take to see self-driving cars all over the roads, carrying passengers and making deliveries? Here are some of the things that likely need to happen first.

Trust Building

The biggest problem facing self-driving cars is that the public doesn’t trust them. People are skeptical of the safety and reliability of self-driving cars, and incidents such as the death of a pedestrian who was struck by a self-driving car hasn’t helped. Currently, public trust in self-driving cars is getting worse. As of May 2018, 73% of people said they don’t trust the cars, while only 63% responded in that way in May 2017. However, it wasn’t long ago that people didn’t trust services like Uber and Lyft, and now they use them in great numbers, because those businesses were able to convince the public that their services were safe. The same thing has to happen for self-driving cars.

Need

The public has to see a reason the self-driving cars make their lives easier and more efficient. In some instances, this involves factors that can’t be controlled, such as the simultaneous decline in public transportation services that happened just as Uber entered the market. If people see a similar benefit, self-driving cars will be in demand on a much larger scale.

One industry that stands to see changes for the better with self-driving cars is delivery services. At Xcel Delivery Services, we’re monitoring the technology and are ready to put it into action to offer even more efficient delivery services in Phoenix when the time is right. For more information about our current services, please call (602) 368-1300.

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