Cruise says its autonomous vehicles can save thousands of lives. But Americans still don’t trust driverless cars

“Our cars do not get distracted, they don’t drive drunk, and they follow the speed limits or whatever the restrictions are on the road,” says Prashanthi Raman, vice president of global government affairs at Cruise.

Cruise became the first autonomous vehicle brand to win permission to operate in a major metro area last year—as opposed to running its cars in limited areas like its rivals were—when it launched its robotaxis across San Francisco. Initially free of charge, Cruise eventually acquired a license to charge for its taxi services in the city and has rolled out services to Austin and Phoenix.

(See my colleague Phil Wahba’s interview with CEO Kyle Vogt earlier this year for more on the company.)

But while Cruise cars never drive drunk, the computer programs guiding the autonomous vehicles can still get things wrong. Just a couple weeks ago, a Cruise vehicle rear-ended a bus in San Francisco. Days earlier, another Cruise vehicle appeared to roll into a street closed by storm damage, getting tangled in the caution tape it steered through blindly. 

Raman is keen to note that Cruise has driven over a million miles without drivers and without any accidents resulting in “life-threatening injuries or fatalities.” Humans, by comparison, cause 1.34 deaths for every 100 million miles driven in the U.S., according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

I would anticipate the autonomous vehicle accident rate to increase as the industry scales, and probably many Americans do, too, which is why the population is still wary of computers driving cars for them. A Pew Research Center survey from March last year found 63% of U.S. adults would not ride in a driverless car, while 45% of adults said they wouldn’t feel at all comfortable even sharing the road with autonomous vehicles. 

Raman says Cruise is working hard to change that discomfort. Cruise is, Raman says, transparent about the company’s shortcomings—see its safety report here—and proactive about engaging communities where Cruise operates, including teaching first responders how to engage with Cruise vehicles when there’s no driver to communicate with.

Customers, Raman says, usually get over their fear of the autonomous vehicle when they actually ride in a driver-free car for the first time, taking a quick journey from fear of the unknown to comfort in mundanity.

“One of the things that we see as those first-time riders enter the car is there’s a mix of skepticism, excitement, enthusiasm, and a complex set of reactions. But once they actually experience the car, within two minutes, they’re back to playing on their cell phones,” Raman says.

At a local level, regulators who have already approved the rollout of autonomous vehicles are forgiving of the tech’s shortcomings, too. Last December, the NHTSA launched an investigation into Cruise’s safety, following three separate incidents where Cruise vehicles caused traffic jams or rear-end collisions. 

Although San Francisco’s transportation agencies wrote to the NHTSA to inform the federal agency of Cruise’s issues, the municipal body said it “believes these incidents reflect the simple reality that the Cruise AV automated driving system is still under development.”

“We do not expect perfection,” the city said. Perhaps, if we want to stop worrying and love the AV, neither should we.

Eamon Barrett
eamon.barrett@fortune.com

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Encryption for some
Messaging companies, like Signal and WhatsApp, in the U.K. are fighting a bill that would force the apps to weaken their end-to-end encryption services so that government agencies can gain access to private messages. As Fortune’s David Meyer reports, governments are frequently at battle against encrypted messaging services, trying to legislate ways to crack into the secure messages in order to scan for signs of terrorism and abuse. But there’s no way for messaging services to selectively implement end-to-end encryption without making services less secure for all users.

Still hallucinating
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai says it’s still a mystery how and why A.I. language models “hallucinate” and that the company’s engineers don’t fully understand how Google’s Bard chatbot works. According to Pichai, researchers call their area of ignorance within A.I. systems a “black box,” and some of its mysteries might never be solved.

TRUST EXERCISE

“The backbone of any new technology is trust. Despite recent innovations, A.I. still faces tremendous hurdles: It can be error-prone, confidently generate plausible, yet incorrect, responses, and even be tricked into ignoring their programmed constraints to perform potentially harmful actions,” IBM CEO Arvind Krishna summarizes in his recent op-ed for Fortune, arguing that A.I. is ready to transform industries, but the tool must be trusted first.

“People working together with trusted A.I. will have a transformative effect on our economy and society. A.I.’s use is projected to unlock nearly $16 trillion in productivity by 2030. It’s time we embrace that partnership—and prepare our workforces for everything A.I. has to offer.”