Since we're in the midst of another political season, we'll see no shortage of polls asking voters about their choices and trying to foresee the future. However, there was one poll released this week that was designed not to predict which candidate people will pick for president, but whether consumers want a self-driving car over one they can control themselves.

Morning Consult asked a national sample of 1,869 registered voters questions about self-driving cars and technology between Jan. 29 and Feb. 1. And like all polls, the results are sliced and diced into a dizzying amount of detail, and with all manner of charts and graphs.

One of the main takeaways, though, was that just over half of the people surveyed (51 percent) said they would not ride in a driverless car. The other half were divided between those who said they would let the car take control (25 percent) or didn't know or care about the technology (24 percent).

While I realize that many people probably haven't experienced self-driving technology—or even driver assist systems like lane-departure prevention and automatic emergency braking—I was surprised that almost half of those polled (43 percent) believe autonomous cars are not safe.

Another third (32 percent) felt that self-driving cars are safe, but almost as many (25 percent) were apathetic and said they didn't know or didn't care about the issue. And an overwhelming majority (75 percent) of those polled expressed concerns about road safety, glitches, and having driverless cars share the road with traditional cars.

But despite what the poll tells us, my view is that self-driving cars are inevitable, especially given significant recent autonomous vehicle news.

Technology Can Be Considered a Driver

Earlier this week, we reported that Google was trying to convince the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA), the federal agency that sets rules for automobile manufacturing and safety, that the company's self-driving technology can be considered a "driver" in a legal and regulatory sense.

In response, the NHTSA sent Google a letter that said "if no human occupant of the vehicle can actually drive the vehicle, it is more reasonable to identify the 'driver' as whatever (as opposed to whoever) is doing the driving. In this instance, an item of motor vehicle equipment, the [self-driving system], is actually driving the vehicle."

Even more revealing was how people might eventually be relegated to being passengers only. The NHTSA letter noted that Google "expresses concern that providing human occupants of the vehicle with mechanisms to control things like steering, acceleration, braking…could be detrimental to safety because the human occupants could attempt to override the [self-driving system's] decisions." That's right: Google communicated to NHTSA that it wants to take human control completely out of the equation, and that the company's autonomous technology can make better decisions than when people are behind the wheel.

I'm in the minority when it comes to accepting the inevitability of self-driving cars. And this could be because I've ridden in several autonomous vehicles, including for miles on a Swedish highway, and also realize it's also not an either/or proposition, despite Google's vision of entirely taking the wheel away from humans.

But this recent move by Google and with automakers' rapid development of autonomous technology shows that, despite the results of the Morning Consult poll, self-driving cars are the future. And even though 63 percent of those polled said they were unlikely to buy a self-driving car within the next decade, I predict that they'll probably at least ride in one much sooner than that.

Or at least have groceries and other goods delivered to their door by self-driving delivery trucks.

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