I think there are two separate issues that you raise that are essentially independent: 1. What evaluation metrics should we use to measure the advancement of s

I think there are two separate issues that you raise that are essentially independent: 1. What evaluation metrics should we use to measure the advancement of self-driving technology? 2. How can we measure the public's level of acceptance for these technologies, and what impact does media coverage (positive or negative) have in that respect? For example, I would not personally gauge that SDCs are in early alpha. However, I live in a suburb of Phoenix, where Uber, Waymo, and Cruise [0] are all conducting extensive testing; I usually observe between 15 and 30 distinct SDCs during my 20-minute commute. I expect this familiarity has (by design, I'm sure) made me more comfortable with SDCs than most. I also assume that the environment is somewhat simpler than other metro areas, as we have very little precipitation and a mostly grid-like street layout. My judgement of these cars is that they approximate the behavior of an extremely stodgy, overly conservative, but ultimately very alert driver. For example, they respond well to being cut off, dealing with late light changes, or unpredictable pedestrian behavior, while dealing poorly with things which require decision-making, such as making a right on red, or preemptively changing lanes to avoid the frequent stops of a bus. In other words, they've been optimizing for safety, and not trip efficiency; I think that this is probably the right order of priorities at this stage of development. Given this, I would be comfortable taking driverless trips around town, on surface streets; I would therefore classify the current state of development as early beta more so than early alpha. However, this is a subjective assessment, not based on any objective metric. At the same time, I read the news too, and I think we are observing the clash of two competing agendas. On one hand, you have the tech companies painting an overly-rosy picture of development, probably to soften up the market to increase (eventual) penetration. On the other hand, you have overly-pessimistic outlets preaching various types of doom (job loss, trolley problem, etc) in order to drive clicks through fear, or (cynically) to poison the market and buy time for later technical entries to catch up to the leaders. Both of these tactics will have varying levels of receptivity with different groups, roughly corresponding (I expect) to the Rogers adoption curve [1]. Therefore, I expect we'll continue to see both optimistic and pessimistic coverage for quite some time. [0]: In this order of development progress, in my opinion [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations