Numlock Sunday: Taylor Orth on self-driving cars
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Taylor Orth, who wrote “Americans warm to driverless cars, though skepticism remains” for YouGov. Here's what I wrote about it:
Interest in driverless car technology increased over the course of 2024, with the percentage of Americans who think it's at least probably likely that driverless cars become widespread on U.S. roads now up to 49 percent, up from 43 percent when the question was posed in 2023. Overall, city dwellers tended to be a little more enthusiastic about the possibilities of driverless vehicles (44 percent said they were very or somewhat enthusiastic) than those in the suburbs (30 percent enthusiastic) or rural areas (20 percent). I can see some of the appeal here, as a resident of a city that has lots of convenient, semiautonomous vehicles that don't require you to drive them; we just call them “subways” though.
We spoke about how attitudes have shifted since …