What’s the future of personal transportation? The car industry is betting heavily that it involves driverless vehicles and ride-sharing. Major carmakers are pouring billions of dollars into autonomous vehicle research and development ($60 billion this year, reports Investor’s Business Daily), with General Motors planning to roll out its autonomous vehicles next year and Ford by 2021.

Yet, Americans still aren’t that interested in driverless cars. A recent survey by online insurer Esurance found that 83 percent had little or no interest in relinquishing driving to a computer. In a 2017 MIT study, nearly half of 3,000 people surveyed said they would never buy a fully autonomous car.

But carmakers don’t envision selling driverless cars primarily to individuals. They’re deploying fleets of driverless vehicles in the hope that consumers will gradually accept the concept of driverless taxis as a way of saving time and money. An Esurance study found that trading car ownership for ride-sharing could save a household up to $4,100 a year.

Driverless ride-sharing could save time as well. Analysis has shown that drivers spend 17 hours every year just looking for a parking space. Driverless ride-sharing could radically reduce the need for urban parking. Cities anticipating a shift to driverless technology, such as San Francisco and Chandler, Ariz. (a Phoenix suburb), are already converting parking spaces into parks, according to MIT Technology Review.

Despite the anticipated benefits, robo-taxi services will have to overcome consumer safety concerns. A recent report by AlixPartners Global Automotive Outlook found that large majorities of consumers had concerns about hardware and software malfunctions and vulnerability of autonomous vehicles to hacking.

Face check

In a joint venture, hotel chain Marriott International and Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba are testing an automated, facial recognition check-in system at two Marriott properties in China.

Guests simply insert an ID into a self-help kiosk, pause for a photo, and add contact details on a screen. After verifying the guest’s identity and booking information, the machine automatically dispenses a room keycard.

The new system, which Marriott hopes to roll out globally, could let guests bypass lines and cut check-in times down to less than a minute, according to the company. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the biometric data would stay private from Chinese surveillance. —M.C.

Phoning it in

“Blockchain,” the technology behind cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, could potentially provide a mechanism for secure, verifiable, and auditable electronic voting.

In June, the tiny Swiss tax haven town of Zug successfully tested a blockchain-based voting system. Participants voted using their smartphones after downloading an app and digitally verifying their identity using a city-issued electronic ID, according to the Swiss News Agency. In the United States, West Virginia became the first state to allow internet voting via blockchain in a small pilot test during the May 8 primary, Government Technology magazine reported.

A blockchain is a public digital ledger of individual transactions distributed across a network of computers. Each vote is a single transaction, and the blockchain securely records the vote tally so that the entire process is transparent while protecting the privacy of the voter.

“Mobile voting using a safe and tested interface could eliminate voter fraud and boost turnout,” write Kevin Desouza and Kiran Kabtta Somvanshi of the Brookings Institution. “It is also a beneficial tool for the election commission to … streamline the process of counting votes and ensure that all votes are counted.” —M.C.