I find it hilarious you're pointing self-driving cars as a "fad". It is such a transformative technology for society, its usefulness is obvious and it's not even deployed, so how then, can it be a fad?

The fad is not the technology but the hype around it. The expectations are overblown. Safe, suitable for mass use, understandable from a legal perspective, self-driving cars most probably won't happen in the next 10 years.

>Germans just have a higher bar for "innovation": It has to be useful.

Somehow they don't find credit cards useful and still pay a lot in cash, when the rest of the world already embraced wireless payments. :)

Alright then, has to be useful whilst not weaponising their lack of privacy.

The rest of the world embraced wireless payments whilst Germans still have a realistic view of privacy impacts. Being at the tail end of that particular adoption curve may still be seen as a feature in Germany. :)

I wish their view were a little more widespread.

I guess if the rest of the world "embraced" it it must be great?

You can pay with credit card for practically anything in Germany. Besides that fact I personally really like to have the option to pay in cash. I don't want literally everything logged by my bank.

They have historical reasons for that. Hard to understand if you don't have the background.

I do have the background, just like people from other countries who lived in the surveillance states and dictatorships. Privacy and anonymity are different things and can be protected in different ways, not necessarily by avoiding leaving any traces in daily life.

Not only privacy and anonymity: in my country there was confiscation. It is harder to confiscate cash than bank accounts. Or to block bank accounts.

Of course they're correct in that particular preference.

> I just don't want a self driving car

Yeah, markets are different. In the US, manual transmissions are almost unheard of these days, in Germany they have a market share of >70% overall and >90% in small cars.