Automotive marketing research and product consultation firm AutoPacific recently conducted a study gauging consumer perception of fully-autonomous vehicle technology.
The study also surveyed participants on which of 56 automotive and technology companies they would trust the most, and the least, to develop safe and reliable fully-autonomous vehicles. 32% of respondents across all age groups picked Tesla as the company they would trust the most.
Image: AutoPacific
Toyota and BMW trailed behind Tesla, ranked number two and number three with 19% and 18% of respondents, respectively, picking them as the company they trust most to develop safe and reliable fully-autonomous vehicles.
Tesla’s autonomous driving system, Full Self-Driving (FSD), has been in public beta in the U.S. for a while now. The technology is far from complete and polarizing, to say the least, but it is undergoing active development and improving with every iteration.
In August 2021, the U.S. government opened an investigation into Autopilot — Tesla’s suite of advanced driver assistance features, which FSD is an optional add-on to — over a series of crashes involving Tesla’s cars and first responder vehicles.
Tesla defended both FSD and Autopilot in a letter to U.S. senators last week, saying the two allow Tesla owners to “drive safer than the average driver in the U.S.”
Earlier this week, Tesla started rolling out FSD beta version 10.11. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a tweet earlier this month that Tesla’s FSD AI has become more advanced than even the best AI software engineers in the world realize. The company has a significant lead over its competitors in the development of fully-autonomous driving technology.
