Cox Automotive study finds robotaxi rides are winning over AV skeptics

Consumer familiarity with autonomous vehicles has climbed from 40% in 2016 to 58% in 2026, and robotaxi rides are a big reason, according to Cox Automotive's 2026 Autonomous Vehicle Study.

The study, released on 28 September, marks ten years since the company first measured attitudes toward the technology. Familiarity with AVs has nearly tripled since 2016, the report found, and 46% of consumers now expect fully autonomous vehicles to arrive during their lifetime, up from 37% in 2021.

Robotaxi usage is still far below awareness. Cox Automotive found that 70% of Americans are aware of robotaxis nationally, rising to 89% in cities where autonomous services operate. Actual usage stands at 18% nationally and 33% among residents of AV cities. Waymo claims roughly 2 million robotaxi rides per month in the U.S., according to CBT News, while Tesla has begun offering public Cybercab rides in parts of Austin.

"The auto industry has always had longer adoption curves for new technologies," said Vanessa Ton, senior manager of Market and Customer Research at Cox Automotive. "Even hybrid vehicles, which have been available to U.S. consumers for more than 25 years, account for only about one in five new-vehicle sales today. For autonomous vehicles, safety concerns and high-profile incidents have slowed progress, but the growing acceptance of robotaxis seen in this year's study indicates that attitudes are clearly evolving."

What buyers want when they buy

The Cox Automotive study found that consumers are most attracted to autonomy levels that preserve the option for human control. Level 4, described as full autonomy capability with the option for a human to drive, was selected by 28% of respondents, down from 30% a decade ago. Interest in fully driverless Level 5 vehicles fell from 17% in 2016 to 10% in 2026.

Ownership of Level 2 and Level 3 vehicles nearly tripled over the last decade, rising from 12% in 2016 to 34% today. A separate finding shows that 57% of consumers said they would choose a Level 3 or higher vehicle for their next purchase if all autonomy levels were available.

That gap between what people say they want and what they actually drive matters for dealers. CBT News reported that the rise in Level 2 and Level 3 ownership puts advanced driver-assist features in front of dealership sales and service teams every day, even as buyers remain attached to the steering wheel.

The study's most striking split is between ownership and ride-hailing. Cox Automotive found that consumers are often more willing to embrace Level 5 autonomy when they do not have to buy the vehicle themselves. Among non-users of robotaxis, 61% cited discomfort with having no human driver as their primary barrier. Yet 55% of Americans said they are open to using robotaxis, suggesting that availability, not interest, is the constraint on adoption.

Experience overcomes skepticism

Cox Automotive's clearest conclusion is that firsthand experience changes minds. The company said the vast majority of robotaxi users noted the experience vastly improved their perceptions of autonomous vehicle technology. That effect shows up in the city-level numbers: usage in cities with autonomous services reaches 33%, roughly one in three residents, compared with 18% nationally.

"Experience overcomes skepticism," CBT News wrote in its summary of the study, noting that shoppers in robotaxi cities are the most likely to arrive at dealerships with firsthand AV experience. The report describes robotaxis as shaping opinions before shoppers reach the showroom.

Confidence indices tracked by The Road to Autonomy show a similar picture, with Waymo leading its Robotaxi Index at 86.7, up 2.7 over the past seven days, followed by Baidu Apollo Go at 80.9 and WeRide at 75.3. Tesla sits at 50.5, up 1.7, while Didi Autonomous Driving is the sharpest laggard at 47.7, down 8.1 over the same period. The index's top-level Robotaxi Confidence Index stands at 57.5, up 0.1.

Those numbers are a snapshot of sentiment rather than a measure of deployed vehicles, but they track the split Cox Automotive found: robotaxi brands with visible fleets score higher than companies whose autonomous work is still mostly internal.

The Cox Automotive study is not the only sign that the AV conversation is changing. IEEE Spectrum reported on 29 September that NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory used Anthropic's Claude models last December to help plan two Mars drives for the Perseverance rover, with human planners checking and adjusting the route before upload. In May, NASA and IBM put a compressed AI model on the International Space Station and a satellite to identify things like floods and clouds from orbit, the first model of its kind demonstrated in space. In July, astronauts on the ISS tested a large language model to see if it could help with questions on maintenance procedures.

Those are space missions, not robotaxis, but the underlying problem is the same one that AV engineers face on Earth: how to trust a nondeterministic system with decisions that used to be made by a human.

"Autonomy often does not have a deterministic outcome, which means that how you got into a certain situation changes the behavior," Robert Ambrose, the former chief of NASA's Software, Robotics, and Simulation Division, told IEEE Spectrum. "So if you come into the same situation but from different paths, the outcome could be different. And so engineers hate that."

Ambrose spent much of his career working on autonomous systems at NASA, including autonomy for the Orion spacecraft and Robonaut 2, a humanoid robot designed to work alongside astronauts that went to space in 2011. His point applies directly to the road: a robotaxi that arrives at the same intersection from a different sequence of events may behave differently, which is exactly the property that makes safety cases hard to write.

The gap between interest and deployment

Cox Automotive's study is careful about what it does not show. A decade ago, some assumed shared autonomous transportation would make vehicle ownership obsolete. That has not happened. Level 3 availability remains limited, and no Level 4 or Level 5 vehicles are available for retail sale. Traditional vehicle ownership remains firmly entrenched.

What has changed is exposure. Cox Automotive found that 70% of Americans are aware of robotaxis nationally, and nearly half expect fully autonomous vehicles in their lifetime. The most recent Cox Automotive study, released on 28 September, frames the shift as one of familiarity rather than conviction.

That distinction matters for how the next phase of the market is covered. The companies with the most visible robotaxi operations, Waymo and Tesla among them, are the ones building the consumer experience that the study says is doing the persuasive work. The companies with lower scores on The Road to Autonomy index are not necessarily behind on technology, but they are behind on letting the public see it.

For now, the vehicles most Americans can actually buy keep a human at the wheel. Cox Automotive's data suggests that is what buyers want, and that robotaxis are doing the work of changing minds one ride at a time.