Would you trust a driverless taxi? Anthony Shephard-Williams explores what happened when he actually got into one, and what his experience reveals about the challenge of researching technologies and innovations people have never experienced before.
I recently went on holiday to Miami, and, within hours of arriving, we started noticing something strange; white cars kept driving past us covered in cameras and sensors. Nothing particularly unusual there perhaps, until we realised there was nobody sitting in the driver’s seat.
They were Waymo: fully autonomous taxis.
Despite working on a few autonomous vehicle projects over the last few years, which have focused on initial perceptions and reactions rather than experiencing them in real life, I’d never actually been in one. Waymo is now testing its vehicles on London roads too, but with humans still behind the wheel ready to intervene. So obviously, I had to try the real thing.
A quick app download later and our first driverless taxi was on its way.
Is this actually happening?
Even the pick-up was slightly surreal. The windows are fairly dark, so when our Waymo arrived we couldn’t see that there was actually someone still sitting inside finishing their previous journey. Cue us standing outside trying to get into their taxi while they were trying to get out.
Eventually they left, we climbed in and the doors closed. We selected ‘start ride’ and then the car started driving.
For the first few minutes it was undeniably weird. You instinctively look towards the driver’s seat and there is simply nobody there. Seeing the wheel turn itself was particularly odd.
Before we got in, I said to my 11-year-old son that this felt like one of those moments in time we would always remember.
“This is actually quite a big deal. We’re going to remember the first time we did this. In 10 or 20 years, this will likely be completely normal.”
He was considerably less impressed by the historical significance of the occasion (that’s kids for you!). Perhaps that in itself tells you something about technology adoption.
From weird to normal. Surprisingly quickly.
What surprised me most was just how quickly the novelty disappeared. Within minutes, we loved it.
There was no driver to make conversation with. Nobody else to think about. And, being in America, no awkward moment at the end where I try to work out how much I should tip, and how to give the tip. It was also cheaper than the equivalent Uber journey.
But it was the little touches that made the experience particularly good. When we got in, the car greeted me by name.
“Hi Anthony. Happy Friday.”
That immediately made us laugh. It then reassured us that we could sing as loudly as we wanted because nobody was listening.
By our second Waymo journey, even some of the friction from the first experience had disappeared. The app suggested switching Bluetooth on so that the car could recognise me and automatically unlock when I approached it.
Suddenly something that had felt completely alien a day earlier was already becoming familiar.
Safety is obviously the elephant in the room when you get into a car with nobody driving it.
Looking into it afterwards, Waymo claims its Driver is more than 10 times safer than an average human driver, based on serious-injury-or-worse crash rates.
It is a pretty compelling statistic. But I’m not sure reading that statistic beforehand would have changed my perception anywhere near as much as actually sitting in the car and experiencing it for myself.
What does the technology adoption curve really tell us?
The technology adoption curve describes how new ideas tend to move from innovators and early adopters into the mainstream, before eventually reaching those most resistant to change.
And for one brief holiday in Miami, I felt like I was sitting at the very left-hand side of that curve. Quite literally sitting in it, in fact.
But the more I thought about it, the less convinced I was that being an “early adopter” is simply a type of person. I hadn’t gone to Miami looking to try a driverless taxi. I didn’t even know Waymo operated there. It was just there, easy to access, cheaper than Uber, and the opportunity to try it presented itself.
Maybe being an early adopter isn’t always about who you are. Sometimes it is simply about whether the right conditions exist for you to try something. Is it easy to try? Is it affordable? Does it feel relevant? Does it remove friction?
Someone might be an early adopter in one category and incredibly reluctant in another.
What interested me most was how quickly my own perceptions changed. Before that first journey, getting into a car with nobody driving it sounded slightly unnerving. After one journey, I liked it. After two, I was actively choosing it over Uber.
And that raises an interesting research question: how good are people at predicting how they’ll react to a new product, service or technology they’ve never experienced?
The research implication: What people say versus what they experience
We spend a lot of time asking people how they think they would react to new products, services and technologies. But when something is genuinely unfamiliar, that can be difficult.
You are asking people to imagine an experience they have never had. A driverless taxi is a good example. You can explain how it works, show people pictures or videos, and ask whether they would trust it, feel safe in it or consider using one. But that still isn’t the same as sitting in the back while the steering wheel starts turning by itself.
And that has an implication for how we research genuinely unfamiliar innovations.
Wherever possible, innovation research should give people some form of experience rather than relying entirely on description. That could be the real product, a prototype, a simulation, a trial, or simply something that gets people closer to understanding what the experience will actually feel like.
If I was researching something like this, I’d want to capture expectations before the experience, observe what actually happens during first use, then measure attitudes again immediately afterwards. Ideally, I’d also come back after a second or third use, because familiarity itself may be part of what drives adoption.
The movement between those points can sometimes tell us more than any one measure on its own. It helps us separate the barriers that are genuinely deep-rooted from those that simply come from unfamiliarity. It can also show which parts of the experience actually drive adoption.
For me, it wasn’t only the fact the car could drive itself. It was the price, the privacy, the personalised touches and how frictionless the whole experience felt.
The technology got me interested. The experience made me want to use it again.
And sometimes that gap between what people expect and what they actually experience might be one of the most useful things we can research.
Perhaps my son had it right all along. I thought we were experiencing the future, while he just thought we were getting a taxi. And maybe that is the point at which new technology really becomes mainstream: when it stops feeling remarkable and simply becomes part of everyday life.
Researching a new technology or innovation?
At Mustard, we help brands understand how people respond to new products, services and experiences, from initial expectations through to real-world use. If you’re testing an innovation and want to understand what people will actually do, rather than simply what they say they might do, get in touch.