Ultimately, not everyone will have to trust driverless cars enough to go for a ride, and especially not at first. Indeed, the public isn’t homogeneous, says Raj Rajkumar, who directs the Metro21: Smart Cities Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He notices three categories of potential users: tech skeptics, who know that their computer crashes and worry about getting into a vehicle controlled by one; early adopters, who are delighted by the promise of new tech; and people who are stressed by driving and would rather not do it if they don’t have to. The early adopters will buy in first, followed by the folks who just dislike driving, and then finally the skeptics, he argues. “So it’s a long process.” Trust grows like a self-driving shuttle drives: slowly.
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