Self Driving Cars and Uber's New Found Popularity

During the school year, I had completed an essay regarding the importance of autonomous cars towards the environment and how they were marketed towards consumers. After finishing the essay, I was intrigued to know more about these self-driving cars and how they really did influence the consumer.

I later went on Google Trend to find some really interesting information about the general public search. First, I had searched the words “autonomous cars” to find nothing out of the ordinary too much. I found that with the growth of technology and the populations knowledge of the environment, so did the search of autonomous cars.

Although, as I started to look at the graph closer I noticed that there was a slight local peak around March 18^th through the 23^rd. This also happened to be the time where there was a fatal crash in Arizona killing a pedestrian. This correlation shows indirect marketing towards autonomous cars as a whole.

Even though I was just interested about the general search of the population regarding self-driving cars, finding out that there was a spike in searches for right after the fatal Arizona crash involving an autonomous car, my interest was then focused towards the company Uber and what their search results looked like.

Uber’s searches had turned out to look quite similar to the autonomous car search done previously. Although while doing this search, I changed the time limit to the past 9 months. This showed that even though the search “Uber” was popular before, there was a distinct peak during March 18^th through March 23^rd.

Although after looking at these two graphs, they both show that over time and once new news came along, the Arizona crash was less important and the searches had started to go back down to what they previously were before.

I do believe that these two searches are directly related due to the time period. I also searched the results of “Lyft”, an Uber competitor, to find that results showed that there was no direct change in their popular searches, even though Lyft has been doing the same as Uber by testing autonomous cars and their road skills.

When these results are put together and shown as below, it is obvious the correlation between the two and what the population is curious about while searching the internet. Even though it shows that Uber overall has a higher search rate, it still shows that the incident with the self-driving car and Uber peaked an interest in people.

After scrolling down to look at more of the information provided by Google Trend, I found that the region that searched self-driving cars the most was Arizona. This is where the fatal self-driving car Uber accident happened.

Overall, this data from Google Trend shows that while people may just find their information on through the news, the graph implied that it elevated their interest even more to find more news on the issue and what it sparked