A national survey of 1,542 American adults shows that 45% are now at least somewhat willing to ride in a self-driving taxi, a signal that public resistance to autonomous vehicles is softening even as a slim majority remains skeptical. The findings arrive at a charged moment: Waymo is expanding its driverless fleet with a growing safety record, Tesla is preparing a tentative robotaxi launch in Austin, and state lawmakers in Texas are pushing back on the timeline. The gap between consumer curiosity and regulatory caution will likely determine how fast robotaxis reach American streets.
What the Marist Poll Actually Found
The survey, conducted from July 17 to 21, 2025, by Marist College, asked respondents how likely they would be to try a self-driving taxi such as Waymo. The topline split: 56% said they were not very likely or not likely at all, while 45% said they were very or somewhat likely. The margin of error was plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.
Those numbers might look like bad news for the industry, but they represent a meaningful shift in public comfort with autonomous technology. A near-even split is far more favorable than the heavy skepticism that dominated similar polls just a few years ago. More telling than the topline, though, are the demographic divides buried in the poll crosstabs. Men were roughly 15 points more likely than women to say they would try a robotaxi. Younger adults showed considerably more openness than older respondents. And the urban-rural gap was stark: city dwellers were about twice as willing as rural residents to climb into a driverless car.
That urban-rural divide matters more than any single topline figure. Robotaxi services from Waymo and Tesla are launching in dense metro areas, not small towns. The relevant consumer base, the people who could actually hail one of these vehicles in the next year, skews heavily toward the demographic groups most open to trying them. For the companies racing to scale, the addressable market is friendlier than the national average suggests.
Age and gender patterns point in the same direction. Younger men living in cities are the likeliest early adopters, and they also overlap with existing heavy users of ride-hailing apps. That overlap reduces the behavioral leap required to try a robotaxi: instead of summoning a human driver in a Toyota Camry, they tap the same kind of app and get a driverless Waymo or Tesla. For older or rural respondents, by contrast, the idea of a car with no one behind the wheel still feels more like science fiction than an everyday transportation option.
Waymo’s Safety Data Strengthens the Case
Consumer willingness does not exist in a vacuum. It tracks closely with trust, and trust in autonomous vehicles depends on hard evidence that the technology is safe. Waymo has been building that evidence base more aggressively than any competitor.
A peer-reviewed study published in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention examined Waymo’s rider-only operations, meaning trips with no human safety driver behind the wheel, across 56.7 million miles of driving through the end of January 2025. The researchers benchmarked Waymo’s crash rates by crash type against human-driver baselines. The analysis found that across multiple crash categories, the autonomous system performed significantly better than the human comparison group.
That 56.7‑million‑mile dataset is substantial. It covers real-world driving across Waymo’s operating cities, not controlled test tracks. And because the study was published in a peer-reviewed journal with transparent methodology, it carries more weight than internal company safety reports, which critics have long dismissed as self-serving. For consumers on the fence, the kind of people who told the Marist Poll they were “somewhat likely” to try a robotaxi, third-party validation of safety claims could be the factor that tips them from curiosity to action.
Still, the study has limits. The data ends in January 2025, and no publicly available update from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or a comparable federal body has extended the analysis since then. As Waymo expands into new cities and handles more complex driving scenarios, the crash-rate picture could shift. The available evidence is encouraging, but it reflects a specific window of operations rather than a permanent verdict.
There is also the question of how quickly safety data filters into public perception. Most riders will never read a traffic-safety journal article. Instead, they will respond to headlines about high-profile incidents, viral social media clips, and word-of-mouth from friends who have tried the service. That dynamic creates a lag between technical performance and public trust. Even if the safety record continues to improve, a single dramatic crash could overshadow millions of uneventful miles in the public imagination.
Tesla’s Austin Launch and the Regulatory Pushback
Tesla is approaching the robotaxi market from a different direction. Rather than building a dedicated fleet of custom vehicles like Waymo, Tesla plans to deploy its existing cars with autonomous software. Elon Musk said the company’s robotaxi service would “tentatively” debut in Austin on June 22, according to AP reporting. The word “tentatively” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Musk has a long history of announcing autonomous-driving timelines that slip by months or years, and the Austin launch faces a specific political obstacle.
Democratic lawmakers in Texas have urged Tesla to delay robotaxi operations until a new state law governing autonomous vehicles takes effect. The friction is not abstract. Legislators have raised safety concerns about allowing commercial robotaxi service before the regulatory framework designed to oversee it is actually in force. Their argument is straightforward: if the state passed a law to set rules for this exact technology, those rules should be active before the vehicles start carrying paying passengers.
Tesla has not publicly issued a formal response to the lawmakers’ request, based on available reporting. That silence creates uncertainty for Austin residents who might otherwise be eager early adopters. The Marist Poll data suggests a willing audience exists, especially among younger, urban, male respondents. But willingness to try a new technology can evaporate quickly if the rollout is surrounded by political conflict and unanswered safety questions.
The Austin standoff highlights a broader tension between state-level regulation and the pace of technological deployment. Companies want to move fast to secure first-mover advantage and gather valuable real-world data. Lawmakers, facing constituents who worry about safety, prefer a slower, more structured timeline. The resulting compromises, pilot programs, limited service zones, or phased launches, will shape how quickly robotaxis become a visible part of city life.
Why the Urban-Rural Gap Could Define Adoption
Most coverage of robotaxi polling focuses on the national split. That framing misses the more important story. Robotaxis are not a national product. They are a city product. Waymo operates in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin. Tesla is targeting Austin first. Every planned deployment is in a dense urban area where ride-hailing demand is high and parking is expensive.
The Marist Poll’s finding that urban residents are roughly twice as likely as rural residents to try a self-driving taxi aligns closely with where these services will actually be available. A rural resident in Montana who says “no thanks” to a robotaxi is effectively weighing in on a hypothetical. A young professional in downtown Austin answering the same question is reacting to a service that may appear in their ride-hailing app within months.
That distinction matters for interpreting the numbers. National skepticism can coexist with strong local demand in the few cities where robotaxis operate. From a business perspective, high adoption among a relatively small population of urban riders could be enough to sustain and expand the services. From a policy perspective, though, the split raises equity questions: if early deployments cluster in affluent neighborhoods and tech hubs, the benefits of safer or cheaper rides may bypass the communities that rely most heavily on transit.
Over time, the urban-rural gap could also influence political attitudes. If city residents gain firsthand experience with safe, reliable robotaxis, they may become more supportive of looser regulations and broader deployment. Rural residents, meanwhile, may form their views from a distance, shaped more by news coverage than by personal use. That divergence could complicate efforts to craft statewide or national rules that satisfy both constituencies.
From Curiosity to Normalization
The Marist Poll captures a moment when self-driving taxis are shifting from novelty to plausible option. Forty-five percent willingness does not guarantee mass adoption, but it does suggest that millions of Americans are at least open to trying a ride. Waymo’s safety record, as documented in peer-reviewed research, gives proponents a strong argument that autonomous systems can outperform human drivers under many conditions. Tesla’s ambitious Austin timetable, and the pushback it has triggered, underscores how much of the rollout will be decided not just by technology, but by politics and public trust.
For now, the path forward looks incremental. Robotaxis will likely expand city by city, neighborhood by neighborhood, with regulators adjusting rules as real-world experience accumulates. Each safe trip will nudge public opinion a bit more toward acceptance; each incident or controversy will pull it back. The survey numbers show that Americans are no longer overwhelmingly opposed to riding in a driverless car. Whether that tentative openness hardens into everyday habit will depend on what happens next on the streets of places like Austin, Phoenix, and San Francisco.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
