Roughly half of all Americans expect self-driving cars to become the norm within the next 10 years

It’s becoming increasingly common to see a self-driving car on the road these days, but we’re still a few years out from considering them the norm.

In addition to the fact that car companies are still working out some technological flaws, a relatively large proportion of Americans are either against or hesitant about the concept of self-driving cars in general. And yet, as this chart from Statista shows, hesitant or not, a little more than half of the 1,503 Americans polled by Gallup expect autonomous cars to be commonly used within 10 years. Only a fourth of them expect it to take longer than 16 years.

Unsurprisingly, Western states are more likely than any other US region to believe it’ll happen within the decade. Leading the way in testing driverless vehicles are Arizona and of course California, where Tesla owners are abundant, and companies have put a total of 409 autonomous test vehicles on the road. Considering the number of well-resourced entities putting money and time towards the effort, the 53% of Americans polled here might not be far off.