Donald Trump's choice to lead the Department of Transportation, Elaine Chao, has worked hard to avoid placing regulatory barriers in the way of self-driving cars. But Chao's boss is a driverless car skeptic, Axios reports.

One Axios source had a conversation with Trump in 2017 where he mentioned owning a Tesla with Autopilot technology. According to the source, Trump "was like, 'Yeah that's cool but I would never get in a self-driving car... I don't trust some computer to drive me around.'"

On another occasion, Trump reportedly said, "Can you imagine, you're sitting in the back seat and all of a sudden this car is zig-zagging around the corner and you can't stop the f---ing thing?"

Trump has reportedly dismissed the concept of driverless cars as "crazy," preferring a human driver to be in control of any vehicle he's riding in.

Trump's reported views on self-driving cars are in line with his views of autonomy more generally. "Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly," Trump tweeted last week in the wake of a Boeing 737 MAX crash. "Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT." People, he wrote, were "always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better."

This apparent divergence between Trump's personal views and the policies of his administration aren't that unusual. Recently, for example, the White House released a budget proposing significant cuts to Medicare and Medicaid—despite Trump's long-standing promises not to cut those programs.

This appears to be the result of Trump's general disinterest in the details of public policy. Trump has strong views on a handful of policy issues—especially trade and immigration—and has actively overseen administration policies in those areas. But in other cases he has picked conventional Republicans for administration jobs and let them implement conventional conservative policies that are not always in line with Trump's own views.

So far, the Department of Transportation has fallen squarely in this latter category. Secretary Chao is the wife of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and has the deregulatory instincts of a conventional Republican. All signs suggest that Trump has given Chao a free hand to put those deregulatory policies into practice.

The question is whether a high-profile self-driving car crash could draw Trump's attention and cause him to push for a different approach. But this doesn't seem very likely. In March 2018, deadly crashes occurred within days of each other involving Uber and Tesla vehicles, respectively. Yet the Trump administration showed little outward sign of changing its hands-off approach.