Autonomous cars carry a lot of emotional baggage for a technology in its infancy. A whopping 73 percent of Americans say they would be afraid to ride in an autonomous vehicle, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA), and self-driving cars are expected to leave as many as a million service drivers — including taxi drivers, school bus drivers, and Uber drivers — unemployed.
Spurred in part by those worrisome trends, a coalition of companies researching, designing, and testing self-driving cars have formed the Partnership for Transportation Innovation and Opportunity (PTIO), a new 501(c)(6) nonprofit policy group that aims to win over the hearts and minds of policymakers and the public. Members include Ford, Toyota, Daimler, Waymo, Uber, Lyft, FedEx, and the American Trucking Associations.
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