Skip to main content

Survey - majority of people would be reluctant to be a passenger in a driverless car

According to a survey carried out by ICM Unlimited on behalf of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, 55 per cent of the 2002 people surveyed said they were unlikely to want to be a passenger of a driverless car, with 40 per cent saying they were very unlikely to want to be a passenger. Just 21 per cent said they would be happy to ride in a driverless vehicle. Philippa Oldham, head of Transport and Manufacturing at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, said: “The benefits of driverless vehicle tech
May 27, 2016 Read time: 2 mins
According to a survey carried out by ICM Unlimited on behalf of the 5025 Institution of Mechanical Engineers, 55 per cent of the 2002 people surveyed said they were unlikely to want to be a passenger of a driverless car, with 40 per cent saying they were very unlikely to want to be a passenger. Just 21 per cent said they would be happy to ride in a driverless vehicle.

Philippa Oldham, head of Transport and Manufacturing at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, said: “The benefits of driverless vehicle technology are huge, with estimates that it could be worth as much as £51 billion a year to the UK due to fewer accidents, improved productivity and increased trade. Furthermore with 95 per cent of all vehicle accidents being the result of human error, it makes sense to look at how we can use this new technology to help save lives.

She said there is clearly still a long way to go to increase public confidence in the effectiveness and safety benefits of driverless technology.

“Government and industry must work together not only to better educate and inform the public about driverless car technology but to make sure that they are developing the products that the end users want.”

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Lessons learned after year of Spin
    October 7, 2021
    Micromobility firm's discussion highlights some challenges of e-scooter deployment in UK
  • WIM system certification is a complex business
    February 21, 2018
    There are interesting moves afoot to create Germany’s first Weigh-In-Motion enforcement site in Hamburg – but Florian Weiss of Traffic Data Systems warns that WIM certification is a complex business. In the past, Weigh-In-Motion (WIM) was mainly used for statistical (WIM-S) and pre-selection (WIM-P) applications. These abbreviations - as well as WIM-E (enforcement) and WIM-T (tolling) - were created by Traffic Data Systems during Intertraffic 2006 in Amsterdam. This was also the year when we started the
  • The cloud - the future of in-car telematics?
    February 28, 2013
    Fiat Chrysler product concept and infotainment director Pierpaolo Tona told the conference that the big car manufacturers need to organise their telematics approach around three key pillars – and the first one of those is people. “OEMs need to understand consumers and their needs better than they understand them themselves,” he commented. The second pillar, suggested Tona, is technology. “Technology is never for the sake of it. Choose the right technology with the right performance to fulfil every consumer’
  • Here: AI has place in ‘privacy by design’
    June 23, 2020
    Artificial intelligence may improve traffic in cities and keep location data private, but Here Technologies shows that it only takes four points of anonymous data to predict your identity.