A survey of members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE) Intelligent Transportation Systems Society and the IEEE’s social media followers shows that the two groups still have some concerns when it comes to autonomous vehicles.

According to a press release issued by the IEEE, both groups were asked several questions relating to several categories: safety, policy (which also touched on regulation and liability), autonomous vehicle technology, and the future of driverless vehicles.

Read more: Driverless and Talking Cars: New Technology Transforms the Way We Travel

When asked what their top concern was with implementing autonomous vehicles into everyday traffic, both the society members (or experts, as they were called in the survey) and social media followers were most worried about safety, with 62.6 percent of experts and 54.3 percent of social media followers expressing unease. A distant second was the lack of confidence in the technology: 20.7 percent of followers and nearly 16 percent of experts expressed this as their main concern.

Children were the focal point of another question. When tasked with rating how comfortable they were having autonomous cars transport their children, with one being the least comfortable and five being the most, just over 70 percent of the experts and nearly 60 percent of the social media followers graded their ease at 3 or below.

Both the experts and social media followers voted visual confirmation as their preferred process for how the autonomous vehicles put human back in control of the vehicle. Nearly 65 percent of the experts and nearly 26 percent of social media followers favored the method. For the experts, audio signal was the second most selected option for the question.

The respondents were asked to rank five issues related to driverless vehicles’ safety based on the need for the problem to be rectified, with one being the most important and five being the least. The experts voted vehicle technology as the most pressing need at an average of 2.3, while the followers said that cyber security was the most important issue at an average of 2.4.

“We want the technologies to come forth, but the priority is to make sure that the public is safe on the roads,” said Bernard Soriano, deputy director for the California Department of Motor Vehicles. “Autonomous vehicles present a myriad of technological and practical issues which need to be addressed moving forward. All of these topics are being discussed with the intention of setting forth regulations in the near future to encourage the continued development of the autonomous vehicle industry, while keeping the motoring public safe.”

There has been a lot of discussion relating to who would be at fault when a driverless car is involved in an accident. Most of the respondents from both groups believe that either the car manufacturer or the company that created the car’s software will be at fault.

For another question, 26 percent of the experts said that they think policy/regulation is the greatest hurdle that must be cleared before autonomous cars can be driven on public roadways. At 25 percent, comfort level was the second most common response experts had to the question. Just over 30 percent of the social media followers voted comfort level/trust as the greatest barrier.

“The key question here is whether the relevant technologies have reached a demonstrated level of socially acceptable risk,” said Bryant Walker Smith, an assistant professor of law at the University of South Carolina and an expert on the legal aspects of increasing automation. “Developers, regulators and eventually courts will consider how safe is safe enough, how certain is certain enough, and how this performance should be determined, demonstrated, and documented. These are crucial questions of engineering, law, and public policy, and they necessarily involve not only engineers and lawyers but also the public at large.”

The survey also touched on what driving activities each group was most likely to conduct with their autonomous vehicle. Just over 63 percent of the social media respondents said they would use the vehicle to commute to work. The other popular choices among the followers was a road trip at 61.2 percent and daily errands at 60 percent. Over three-quarters of the experts said they would use a driverless vehicle for daily errands, with daily commuting, 74.1 percent, and road trip, 60.7 percent, following in popularity.

The respondents were asked to rank which technologies they thought were the most important for autonomous vehicles moving forward, with one being the most important. Both the IEEE social media followers and experts voted that sensor technology such as Lidar/Ridar was the most important, with a 2.3 and 2.2 average respectively. Computer vision was the second most popular overall choice, followed by automatic braking, lane-centering technology, and GPS.

“Within the last 15 years, we’ve seen a tremendous amount of growth in technology as well as in consumer acceptance of vehicle automation,” stated Wei-Bin Zhang, IEEE fellow and a program manager at the California PATH program, Institute of Transportation Studies of University of California, Berkeley. “The industry will continue to thrive as consumers become more accepting of vehicle automation, especially as more of these technologies become implemented in modern day vehicles. Just a few years ago, automated parking was a revolutionary new technology – now it comes as a standard option in some production models. This is how I believe driverless vehicles will come to be accepted in the future.”

Both groups of respondents believe that autonomous vehicles will be on public roadways within a few years. Well over half (61.6 percent) of IEEE’s social media followers think driverless vehicles will be made available to the public by 2025, while 83.7 percent of the experts believe the vehicles will be on roadways by 2030.

With much confidence both groups voted that autonomous vehicles will go to market via a process of “continued, gradual inclusion of driverless technologies.” More than 90 percent of the experts and more than 85 percent of the IEEE social media followers believe that that is how the process will play out.

Finally, both groups believe that the U.S. will be the first country to mass adopt autonomous vehicles. Germany and Japan finished second and third in the social media follower voting, while Japan beat out Germany in the expert poll.

“I think that we are absolutely going to be seeing driverless vehicles on the road in the near future, possibly in as little as five years. These vehicles may not be completely autonomous, meaning the driver would be responsible to take control of the vehicle at some point during the ride, but could see full autonomy being reached within a decade,” said Jeffrey Miller, IEEE member and associate professor of engineering practice at the University of Southern California. “Experts from all over the world are contributing to this industry and it will be interesting to see which country is able to offer driverless vehicles first. Environment, regulations and consumer acceptance will be key drivers to its success.”