If The Shoe Fits: Change Requires Trust
by Miki Saxon
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.
Sometimes predictions are hilarious, especially those about where technology is taking us.
It’s not that they get the tech wrong, but they often don’t factor in the minor details — such as customers.
Media is aglow with stories of how autonomous vehicles (AVs) will literally change the world beyond anything you can imagine.
In a recent survey by AAA, for example, 78% of respondents said they were afraid to ride in an AV. In a poll by insurance giant AIG, 41% didn’t want to share the road with driverless cars. And, ironically, even as companies roll out more capable semi-AVs, the public is becoming less—not more—trusting of AVs, according to surveys over the past 2 years by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge and marketing firm J.D. Power and Associates.
And then there’s security.
Every time a software hack is reported, especially from a vulnerability the company knew about two years before it happened, as with Chrysler’s Jeep, or a bank, a retailer, a whatever, people grow more and more aware of just how vulnerable a software-based world that runs on online updates actually is.
Speaking at the National Governors Association meeting last year, Tesla’s Elon Musk, said, “I think one of the biggest concerns for autonomous vehicles is somebody achieving a fleet-wide hack.”
The solution?
Mr Musk insists that a kill switch “that no amount of software can override” would “ensure that you gain control of the vehicle and cut the link to the servers”,
But what does control mean to an inert lump of metal that has no gas pedal, brakes, or steering wheel?
The car would just shut down wherever it was — maybe the middle of the freeway at rush hour or a lonely mountain road during a storm.
So customer trust and security are the main obstacles to the AV/tech-enabled world companies large and small are drooling over.
Given most companies historically cavalier attitude towards security and the general distrust of auto companies in particular, the result of multiple recalls over the years, changing people’s minds won’t be easy.
And for every step forward a major hack will mean at least three steps back.
Image credit: HikingArtist
