"Tesla With Autopilot Hits Cop Car--Driver Admits He Was Watching a Movie." The headline from August was riveting--and easy for readers to dismiss as something that could never happen to them. While an unfortunate few can turn anything you hand them into an implement of disaster, most of us possess the common sense to not do anything so reckless while driving new automation-equipped cars. At least, we think we do. But shrug off that headline at your own peril.

U.S. drivers' fears of fully autonomous (self-driving) vehicles has risen in the past several months according to a new survey by AAA. SAN FRANCISCO -- Waymo's self-driving mission is about to mushroom. The Alphabet-owned autonomous car company announced Thursday that it is significantly ramping up its partnership with Fiat Chrysler and over time will add up to 62,000 Pacifica Hybrid minivans to its fleet. That's a significant bump from a January announcement in which Waymo, which started out as Google's self-driving car project in 2009, said it would add "thousands" of new FCA minivans. The news speaks to the quickening pace of Waymo's development of fully self-driving vehicles, which have been testing around the Phoenix area for more than a year.

An Audi A8 in testing mode works on refining a suite of semi-autonomous driver-assist features that allow drivers to hand over some tasks to the automobile, though they must check in with the steering wheel often to keep the system active. Car companies battling for their share of $2 trillion in annual global auto sales increasingly lean on shiny tech that takes over some of the driving from humans. Boasting names such as Autopilot, Super Cruise and ProPilot Assist, these systems -- whose radar and cameras are the building blocks of self-driving cars -- are part of a growing effort by manufacturers to woo with computing power rather than horsepower. But on the heels of two Teslas that crashed while on Autopilot, automakers find themselves increasingly torn between hyping the tech and warning owners about its limitations. Nissan's ProPILOT Assist technology, which is paving the way for future fully autonomous vehicles, is aimed at reducing the hassle of stop-and-go driving by helping control acceleration, braking and steering during single-lane highway driving. But drivers must constantly oversee the system, Nissan says.

USA Today's Nathan Bomey takes Cadillac's Super Cruise for a test drive. In this Friday March 23, 2018 photo provided by KTVU, emergency personnel work a the scene where a Tesla electric SUV crashed into a barrier on U.S. Highway 101 in Mountain View, Calif. The National Transportation Safety Board has sent two investigators to look into a fatal crash and fire Friday in California that involved a Tesla electric SUV. The agency says on Twitter that it's not clear whether the Tesla Model X was operating on its semi-autonomous control system called Autopilot at the time. Investigators will study the fire that broke out after the crash.

Most people still say they wouldn't buy a self-driving vehicle, but they become far more open to the idea after they try cars with automatic driver-assist features. That's according to a survey conducted by global consulting firm AlixPartners. Only 18% of those surveyed reported personal experience with driver-assist features such as automatic braking, lane keeping and adaptive cruise control. Among those, 49% said they are "confident" or "very confident" of driverless cars, 21% are neutral and 31% are not confident. Of respondents with no experience with self-driving features, only 28% said they were confident or very confident of driverless cars.

Tesla faces new scrutiny in China about its vehicle Autopilot system after state television broadcast allegations that a man killed in a crash had activated the driver-assist feature of his car. The state broadcaster CCTV aired a report Wednesday about a January crash that killed 23-year-old Gao Yaning. The report included apparent dash cam footage of the car slamming into a slow-moving orange truck. An official interviewed in the report said the car's Autopilot feature was active at the time of the crash. CCTV reported Gao's family has sued Tesla in a Beijing court, though the lawsuit was not available in online court records.