In personally owned cars, autonomous ride is a comfort feature. For ride-hail providers, it is an 'enabling tool'. It offers them the possibility to taxi people around without needing human drivers. For it to actually get the status of a proven, approved and certified safety feature will take at least a decade. But there might be something bigger at play: in a time that people already feel dependent on modern technology in all aspects of life, it is only human to want to cling on to manual-drive — which might be a problem: a mix of AVs and conventional cars does not sound like a good idea.