Autonomous vehicles: who will use them, and will they share?

ABSTRACT

The advent of road transport automation is suggested to be one of four key technological transitions that could amount to a major transformation in mobility practices. Specifically, fully Automated Vehicles (AVs) might replace the current private car owner user model with fleets of on-demand synchronously-shared automated taxis. However, significant barriers to this vision becoming the norm remain. This paper examines two critical user-acceptance aspects of the transition: willingness to adopt AVs, and willingness to share an AV with others, particularly strangers. Our novel survey (n = 899) included a choice experiment featuring four future full automation transport services (private, synchronously/asynchronously shared, and public). Cluster analysis examined respondents' preferences and their demographic and psycho-social characteristics. We uncover significant uncertainty about willingness to adopt automation and sharing, and important differences between clusters within our sample. For example, under 50% of participants report willingness to use an AV over their normal mode, or would prefer an automated option to a current human-driven option. Our findings raise critical questions for policymakers and transport authorities. Not least, how can AV technologies help realise the environmental and social benefits of widespread vehicle sharing in a context of a travelling public that still prefers its privacy on-the-move?

KEYWORDS:

• Transport
• autonomous vehicles
• AV
• shared mobility
• willingness to use
• willingness to share

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the support of the Venturer consortium, to South Gloucestershire Council and Bristol City Council in particular for assistance in recruiting survey participants, and to those citizens who took part for giving their time.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The West of England Combined Authority area includes three Local Authority areas: Bath and North East Somerset, City of Bristol, and South Gloucestershire.

2 Note: Outliers have been excluded in this analysis. For AV Car, a number of participants had entered extreme £/mile values which can be attributed to a misunderstanding of the question, with people entering values for the price of the vehicle as opposed to that specific trip. These values were identified and removed. A boxplot was then produced in SPSS to identify outliers for AV-Taxi, Shared-AV, and AV-Bus, and all the extreme values were removed. In particular, with respect to the different AV modes: 37 extreme values (> £1.33/mile) were excluded from AV car; 33 extreme values (>=1.33 £/mile) where excluded from AV bus; 35 extreme values (>=3.33 £/mile) were excluded from AV taxi; 35 extreme values (>=1.50 £/mile) were excluded from Shared-AV.

3 It should be acknowledged that the scenarios were not and could not be identical for everything other than the presence of another person. There were also some differences in service quality that should be kept in mind when interpreting these findings.

Additional information

Funding

The research reported in this paper was funded by Innovate UK (grant reference 102202) and undertaken as part of the Venturer Project.