It's Time to Market

The next frontier is cultural, not technical

This is the Ride AI newsletter: The most comprehensive weekly digest of news and intelligence at the intersection of technology and transportation.

Below is a script I wrote to complement my opening for this year’s Ride AI. It’s a story I felt needed to be told about how technology actually gets diffused versus how we tell ourselves it happens. The AV industry is on the precipice, and I continue to believe that the next frontier is cultural, not technical.

It’s Time to Market

I want to start with something that will sound obvious the moment I say it. But it wasn’t obvious at the time.

A century ago, enteritis, botulism, and typhoid killed tens of thousands of Americans—many of them infants—every year. And yet, people didn’t trust refrigerators.

In Paris, one store owner had to drag his newly purchased refrigeration equipment into the street and smash it to pieces to appease customers who believed cold-stored food was dangerous. Salesmen with old food were a genuine historical scourge. Fresh was safe, and cold-stored suspect.

In 1930, only 8 percent of American households owned a mechanical refrigerator. By 1940, it was 6x higher, even as the Great Depression ravaged the country. By 1960, they were nearly universal in America.

How does that happen?

Not because the technology suddenly got better. The refrigerator had existed commercially since 1913. Not because it became cheap overnight: a unit advertised in 1933 at $99.50 would be roughly $1,700 today. And yet, a technology many people were actively fearful of became one most people couldn’t imagine living without in the span of ten years.

General Motors(!) owned Frigidaire Refrigerator Delco Light Home NGM2

Frigidaire’s answer to this challenge wasn’t a rational rebuttal to the Parisian store owner. They hired the first Director of Home Economics in the industry’s history and tasked her with educating homemakers that the upfront cost was actually lower over time. They co-sponsored cooking schools with electric utility companies. And Ohio Edison Electric sponsored a magician in 1929 who handed out cards at his shows, guiding audiences to the Frigidaire salesman waiting in the lobby.

What they understood, and what is often easy to keep forgetting, is that you cannot argue people into trust. You have to give them an experience. You have to make them feel it before they’ll believe it.

The refrigerators they made were also white. Deliberately, pointedly, symbolically white—because white meant clean, and clean meant that you were a good parent who cared about the safety and health of your family.

“A vital safeguard to health“ selling identity and hygiene, not cold storage.

Here’s how completely marketing solved the trust problem: in France, the word for refrigerator is “frigo”, short for Frigidaire. The brand became so synonymous with the product that it literally entered the dictionary.

We are living through the same inflection point with AVs right now. And once again, the price of getting it wrong is dead children.

The pattern nobody teaches in engineering school

Every generation or so, a technology arrives that is genuinely and objectively better than what it replaces, yet the public still refuses to adopt it. The technology works. The data is clear. The benefits are real, yet people don’t use it, don’t trust it, and, in some cases, actively fight it.

People are right to be skeptical of things that are new, unfamiliar, and carry perceived risk. The question is never whether the fear is rational, it’s whether the story being told is powerful enough to move people through that fear anyway.

LESSONS FROM ELECTRIFICATION

“An Unrestrained Demon” – Artist Unknown. Judge, vol.17, no.419 (26 October 1889)

The illustration above ran in Judge magazine in October 1889, two weeks after a Western Union lineman named John Feeks was electrocuted on a telegraph pole in broad daylight, on one of Manhattan’s busiest streets, at lunch hour. He had been sent to untangle some wires. He wasn’t wearing his rubber gloves or insulated boots. What he didn’t know was that a few blocks away, wind had tangled one of those wires into a high-voltage streetlight cable. When he slipped and grabbed the nearest wire to stop his fall, he died instantly, sparks arcing across his body in full view of the crowd below. It took over an hour for another lineman to retrieve his body.

The public reaction was immediate and visceral. Newspapers stoked the panic. Citizens were warned that any metallic object—a doorknob, a railing, a lamp post—could become an instrument of sudden death at any moment. People ripped telegraph devices and telephones out of their homes, convinced that the wires connecting them led straight to the grave. Harper’s Weekly captured the mood perfectly: you could go years unharmed, but when the moment comes, you are killed instantly.

“DISCOVERED! Judge’s appliance for the prevention of accidents by electric wires” – Artist: Grant E. Hamilton. Judge, vol.17, no.427 (21 December 1889)

Judge published a second cartoon offering a “solution” to the crisis: rubber suits for everyone (including horses and dogs) to be worn at all times in public, like deep-sea diving gear for the streets of New York.

REA New Deal campaign — ‘Electricity on the Farm.’

But by the 1920s, electricity was real, the infrastructure was real, and the benefits were obvious to anyone who had it. But most Americans didn’t have it—and the ones who didn’t weren’t clamoring for it, because they didn’t know what they were missing.

Utility companies and appliance makers launched promotional campaigns through home economics magazines, cooking demonstrations, and civic exhibitions. They sold the electrified household as the key to a better, more prosperous life. They ran a campaign literally called “Electrify Your Home.”

They didn’t explain the science. They didn’t publish wattage tables. They didn’t argue with people who were skeptical about the grid.

General Electric — ‘Gold Medallion Home.’

They sold an aspiration: the modern family, the modern home. General Electric’s Gold Medallion Home program awarded homes a literal gold medallion if they met a checklist of all-electric appliances. It was promoted through glossy ads and celebrity endorsements and positioned as a symbol of upward mobility and patriotic participation in the future.

VINCE AND LARRY

Two rubber dummies outperformed a decade of safety legislation. The lesson is uncomfortable.

When a Michigan state representative introduced a mandatory seatbelt fine bill in the early 1980s, he received hate mail comparing him to Hitler. At the time, only 14 percent of Americans regularly wore seatbelts—even though the federal government had required them in all new cars since 1968. People were selling T-shirts designed to look like a worn seatbelt so you could avoid the fine without actually buckling up.

The technology was mandatory. The data was clear. The resistance was total. And then came Vince and Larry.

Crash test dummy commercials. “You could learn a lot from a dummy”.

Two crash test dummies. One tagline: “You can learn a lot from a dummy.” The PSAs ran during SmackDown, NASCAR, and the Indy 500. In the first six months of 1986, reported seatbelt use jumped from 23 percent to 39 percent. Between 1982 and 1988, usage went from 11 percent to 47 percent nationwide. An estimated 29,568 lives were saved between 1983 and 1991.

As a fun trivia question, what is the one state that still doesn’t have a mandatory seatbelt law? New Hampshire, but at least they own their tagline: LIVE FREE OR DIE.

New Hampshire License Plate. “LIVE FREE OR DIE”.

Where we are now in autonomous vehicles

“For a ride, it’s not a technical problem. I mean, the technology is solved.” - Dmitry Dolgov, Waymo Co-CEO Cheeky Pint, March 2026

The Waymo data paints a clear picture on safety, it doesn’t guarantee success or adoption

Right now, today, autonomous vehicles have crossed critical technical thresholds. The leaders are out of discovery and into scaling. Waymo is providing more than 500,000 paid rides per week (or roughly 4 million miles per week) across 11 US cities and scaling at a pace that is hard to keep up with. Tesla’s FSD fleet is logging roughly 140 million miles per week right now—about 20 million miles per day. They crossed 8.4 billion cumulative miles recently and logged 1 billion miles in just the first 50 days of 2026.

The safety data is extraordinary. A Waymo and Swiss Re insurance analysis found approximately 88 percent fewer property-damage claims and approximately 92 percent fewer bodily-injury claims per mile compared to human drivers, across 25 million driverless miles. To put that plainly: if a human driver and a Waymo both made a million trips, the Waymo would cause roughly one-tenth the harm.

66% of U.S. drivers say they’re afraid to ride in a self-driving vehicle — AAA, 2024

13% would trust riding in one today — down from prior years of tracking

This is the refrigerator problem. This is the seatbelt problem. The technology is real, but the trust is absent. And without trust, the technology sits in the garage of history while people keep dying in crashes that are already preventable.

Every year, 40,000 Americans die in car accidents. Globally, 1.35 million. The fastest path to eliminating a meaningful percentage of those deaths is sitting right in front of us. The bottleneck is the story we’re telling—or failing to tell.

THE ADDED COMPLICATION: THE AI SHADOW

March 2026 NBC Poll shows only The Democratic Party and Iran have a lower net favorability ratings than AI

The refrigerator industry had one fear to overcome: that cold-stored food was dangerous. We have two. Before people can trust autonomous vehicles, they have to trust AI. And right now, that is a significant problem.

A December 2025 YouGov survey found that only 5 percent of Americans say they trust AI “a lot.” Fifty-three percent do not trust AI systems to make a decision or take action, even somewhat. Seventy-seven percent are concerned that AI could pose a threat to humanity. The Edelman Trust Barometer notes that a decade ago, 73 percent of Americans trusted technology companies—today that number is 63 percent, and falling.

The AI trust deficit will cascade directly to AV adoption. People who don’t trust AI won’t trust the thing that drives using AI. We’re selling a new technology built on a foundation that a majority of the public actively mistrusts.

What history tells us to do

The Tesla FSD safety data is a Rorschach test for mobility experts, and probably not worth arguing about, because it won’t move the needle of adoption like other campaigns will

The electricity industry didn’t wait for everyone to figure out that light bulbs were good. They showed up in your kitchen with a cooking demonstration. They put it in Good Housekeeping. They awarded your house a gold medal. They made you feel like the future was already here—just not yet in your home.

The refrigerator industry didn’t publish white papers on food safety. They made the machine white to signal cleanliness. They ran financing deals. They put a magician in the lobby.

The seatbelt advocates didn’t convince people with mortality statistics. They invented two rubber crash test dummies with the best comedic timing in television history, and they ran the ads during NASCAR and Smackdown.

Eventually, a technology matures to the point that it’s no longer held back by its capability but by its story.

Each of those campaigns had something in common: they met people where they were, emotionally and culturally, and gave them a new way to think about their own identity in relation to technology. The modern homeowner. The sophisticated traveler. The responsible parent. The person who isn’t a dummy.

We need that for autonomous vehicles. And we need it now—while the technology is still establishing itself, while the trust gap is still closeable, and before the narrative gets away from us entirely.

The pessimists and status-quo-safetyists sound smart. They always do. But the status quo is more than one million preventable deaths every year. The people who changed the world are the ones who figure out how to make ordinary people feel it is time to try something new.

The engineers have done their part (and aren’t going to stop pushing). The safety data is there. The miles are there. The scale is there. The next phase of the autonomous vehicle story is not a technical problem. It’s a human one.

It’s time to market.