ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
With all this talk about self-driving cars, we wondered - do people even want them? About 90 percent of people say they have some level of concern about self-driving cars. That's according to surveys by the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute. Brandon Schoettle is a project manager there, and he has been posing this survey annually. He says answers are a mixed bag.
BRANDON SCHOETTLE: The largest single answer we got was that people don't want a self-driving vehicle. However, when you combine the responses we got for partially self-driving or completely-self driving, then a majority of people we talked to want some version of a self-driving vehicle. In that survey, though, we also asked a question about concern for riding in self-driving vehicles. And we got, within one or two percentage points, the same exact answers we got in the survey we did the previous year. So the level of concern, it hasn't gotten any worse and it hasn't gotten any better. Though depending on how you look at it, there's much more interest in the self-driving vehicle that one can take control over versus the one that takes complete control away from the driver.
SHAPIRO: It seems a little surprising that as people learn more about self-driving vehicles, they're on the news more, that the numbers haven't changed much.
SCHOETTLE: Yeah, there's some competing forces. While every month that goes on you sort of see more and more of what these vehicles can do, there's also more discussion about some of the things they can't do. They kind of cancel each other out, and I think that's sort of left us with this - no change in the level of concerns.
SHAPIRO: What about the other side of the coin? When you look at people who are super enthusiastic about self-driving cars, what appeals to them about it?
SCHOETTLE: Well, of course there's the safety aspect. These vehicles - some people tell you as a bit of a criticism - they drive ultra-safe. As people, I think, in California who are used to seeing some of these vehicles around Mountain View will tell you, they're not a vehicle they necessarily want to be behind because it drives slower than your average driver, it drives more safely than the average driver. And this is the ultimate goal or promise of these vehicles - drastically improve safety over the average driver on the road.
SHAPIRO: States are wrestling with what the appropriate regulations are. For example, California's DMV has proposed a requirement that a licensed driver be able to take over a driverless car at any time. Do you have any suggestions for what states considering this issue should do?
SCHOETTLE: Well, this fits in with some suggestions we've made. We have a report that we put out where we discussed the idea of whether there should be some sort of licensing. And this is exactly the type of thing California suggested as part of their draft regulations. They've proposed a third-party testing take place for these vehicles. And basically what would happen is the manufacturers would state a claim about what it is the vehicle can or can't do, and a test would occur to actually prove whether that's the case. And anything that the vehicle's not able to handle at the current time would just have to be handled by the human driver. Down the road, possibly decades later, we can envision these vehicles driving around with nobody in them, going from one person to the next to pick them up. But as a first step, the requirement for a licensed driver makes sense to us.
SHAPIRO: That's Brandon Schoettle of the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute speaking with us from member station WUOM. Thanks for joining us.
SCHOETTLE: Thank you.