Even as Musk and Tesla are already being sued over their Robotaxis, we might have already hit a tipping point for self-driving cars: The No. 1 feature that drivers want in their next new car is hands-free driving. That's according to the 2025 AutoPacific Future Attribute Demand Study (FADS), which saw impressive interest in three different variants:
And the 2025 FADS just might have been a tipping point for advanced driver-assistance features (ADAS) in general. They had barely registered on past FADS surveys. Rear auto braking, for example, was the only ADAS technology mentioned in the 2024 AutoPacific study, coming in ninth on the list of 10 most in-demand features — right between sunshades for rear passengers and a built-in air compressor. The 2025 version included not only three versions of hands-free driving and rear auto braking but also adaptive cruise control with lane centering and stop/go capability, lane-change assistance, rear cross-traffic alert with rear auto braking, evasive steering assistance, and large-animal detection.
What's behind the sudden growth in demand for ADAS, and especially hands-free driving? It seems like the more folk know about these features, the more they want them. The bottom line from AutoPacific's FADS research is that "awareness and first-hand experience" with ADAS were shown to boost interest in the technology, with customer demand dependent more on awareness than experience.
With that in mind, it's possible Tesla's troubles are having an any news is good news effect on hands-off ADAS tech, since regardless of how well the brand's features work, there's certainly no shortage of news about them. Which could explain why the amount of people who agreed that "I want my vehicle to be able to safely drive itself so I can do other things" jumped from 38%in the 2024 FADS to 48%this year. So companies are responding, especially EV makers. For instance, Rivian added hands-free Highway Driving Assist earlier this year, and Lucid recently announced its own Hands-Free Driver Assist is finally coming.
But age plays a factor in ADAS demand, too. Despite younger drivers (aged 40 and under) having more overall awareness of ADAS, older drivers as a whole show more demand. Here, AutoPacific points out that the older drivers are particularly interested in features "that assist the driver with their ability to easily see around them."
With all due respect to AutoPacific, we're going to switch over to NHTSA's criteria for the 6 levels of automated driving to look how current systems work in the real world. The scale goes from 0 to 5, with 0 meaning a vehicle provides only momentary assistance through alerts and warnings, and 5 applying to cars that can function with full autonomy, with no need for the driver to pay attention, on all roads and at all times. And the number of cars for sale to the public that can do that is also zero.
The only brand that can even reach Level 3 autonomy is Mercedes-Benz, with its Drive Pilot technology that explicitly allows you to take your eyes off the road when it's operating. All the other setups, including Super Cruise, BlueCruise, Full Self Driving — along with examples such as BMW's Active Driving Assistance Professional, Nissan's ProPilot Assist 2.0, and others — are Level 2 hands-free technologies.
They do provide some limited hands-free driving opportunities, but NHTSA still considers drivers as "fully responsible for driving" in these cars because they have to always be monitoring the road and ready to take over at any moment. Of course, that didn't seem to help when a young basketball phenom found himself fighting FSD in a fiery Tesla Cybertruck crash. (And no, we're not picking on Tesla, we're just trying to boost awareness of hands-off ADAS technology like we mentioned above.)
