Your next car: Will you be a co-pilot or a passenger?

Are you ready for a car that drives itself?

How about one without a steering wheel?

Results of a new survey from Insurance.com show many U.S. drivers are ready for a computer co-pilot, but less willing to hand over control completely.

The goal is simple: Use technology to get from Point A to Point B more safely and efficiently than drivers could ever do by themselves. But there are competing visions on how to get there:

• Traditional automakers such as Nissan want to ease us into the computer-driven future as they slowly add autonomous features to traditional vehicles.

• Google, on the other hand, wants to plunge straight into the deep end with podlike cars that lack a steering wheel, gas pedal and brakes.

The technology isn't decades away. In many respects, it's already here. Antilock brakes, cruise control and stability control have long taken over critical tasks drivers used to handle for themselves.

Today, self-parking, traffic-jam assist and collision avoidance aren't uncommon, even on less expensive cars.

The Insurance.com survey found that 22.4 percent of respondents would buy a vehicle with fully autonomous capabilities - that is, capable of operating without driver input in certain situations -- if it were available today. But slightly more - 24.5 percent - said they would never consider it.

Kick in some and acceptance climbs. An 80 percent discount on car insurance boosts the “very likely to buy” rate up to 37.6 percent and drops the “never” down to 13.7 percent.

Safer? Absolutely

Data shows that human error is responsible for 95 percent of all car accidents. According to the National Highway Safety Transportation Administration (NHTSA) roughly 32,300 people were killed in car accidents in 2011.

Drunken and distracted driving - two things an autonomous car can never do - were responsible for 13,209 of those deaths.

A study by nonprofit Eno Center for Transportation predicts that if only 10 percent of the cars on the road were self-driving, accidents would be cut by 211,000 a year, deaths would drop by 1,100 and the economic savings would hit $22.7 billion.

When 90 percent of the cars are autonomous, 4.2 million accidents would be avoided, a whopping 21,700 lives would be spared and the monetary savings would be an astronomical $450 billion.

“A world full of self-driving vehicles would radically change the insurance industry by eliminating the human error that accounts for the majority of vehicle crashes,” says Bill Hampton of Autobeat Group, which publishes industry data and analysis. “Look at it this way: What is the cost of insuring a person to be vehicle driver vs. insuring the same person to be a passenger on a bus, train or plane?”

A drop-by-drop rollout that leaves car owners in control means savings may not be as substantial, or as obvious. Incremental advances such as collision-avoidance systems usually aren't accompanied by a specific insurance discount. While the vast majority of survey respondents reported they had at least one of the following computer-controlled safety features on their cars, only the first, anti-lock brakes, routinely nets a discount:

• Anti-lock brakes: 82.2%

• Electronic stability control: 28.2%

• Lane-departure warnings: 11.5%

• Backup camera: 18.6%

• Automated parking system: 5.3%

• Collision warning or collision avoidance system: 7.3%