Users adoption and integration of automated driving technologies in their everyday lives will be ultimately influenced by different factors including trust, users acceptance (comprising perceived usefulness, ease of use and satisfaction), knowledge (comprising knowledge of function and problem perception), compliance with social norms and personal values and willingness to pay (including perceived affordability and desirability) (Karlsson et al., 2011). According to the theory of Diffusion of Innovations (Rogers, 1995), there are four main contributory elements: the innovation (including aspects such as relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability and observability), the communication channels (e.g. mass media), time (from first knowledge to adoption, influenced by the innovativeness of an individual: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards) and the social system (e.g. existing cultural and religious norms, external influences and interpersonal information). Overall users’ acceptance of AVs is gradually improving, but is anyway an issue to be properly tackled as it can potentially be a barrier to actual systems use.
For example, a UK study (FIA, 2015 (16)) found that half of the respondents would not trust manufacturers and government assuring that AVs are safe. Only 38% of the respondents agreed that AVs would be as safe as human driven ones. Results of a 2014 survey (Schoettle and Sivak, 2014a) revealed that although most respondents had a positive impression of the automated driving technology, a large percentage of them said they had concerns that AVs would not drive as well as human drivers (a 90.1% said they had some level of concern). At EU level, a special Eurobarometer study conducted in 2014 on autonomous systems found that 61% of the respondents would not feel comfortable travelling in an autonomous car (European Commission, 2015g), with men and young people being more prone to feel comfortable with the technologies. As opposed to these results, a French study (Payre et al., 2014) showed that 68.1% of the 421 participants who answered an online questionnaire, a priori accepted AVs. Almost 71% of respondents declared an interest in using AVs while being impaired (e.g. alcohol, medication affecting driving). According to this research and in line with other studies, men showed a stronger intention to use an AV and were more inclined to use and buy one. Likewise, the higher the driving-related sensation-seeking, the more drivers intended to use an AV. A strong positive correlation was also found between attitudes and intention to use an AV. The preferred use cases were monotonous and stressful driving conditions such as highways, traffic congested situations and parking. However, AVs would be less used in built-up areas according to the findings of this study, probably because drivers felt more confident in their own skills compared to the vehicle in situations where road hazardous circumstances can occur more frequently.
Overall, users’ acceptance towards AVs is slowly improving as people are starting to experience more and more with the technologies through the existing demonstration and marketing activities of the various manufacturers and technology companies. A survey (Giffi et al., 2017) found that US consumer interest in advanced vehicle automation has
increased since 2014 (see Figure 19), especially among the younger generations. Safety- related applications are the most valued ones. On the contrary, users’ willingness to pay for these technologies has decreased since 2014 (see Figure 20).
Figure 19. Percentage of US consumers interested in automation technology (2014-2016
comparison)
Source: Giffi et al., 2017 (Copyright © 2017. Deloitte Development LLC. All rights reserved).
Figure 20. Percentage of US consumers not willing to pay for vehicle features
A recent study involving 12,000 survey respondents from 11 European countries plus 48 focus group participants from 4 European countries focused on how drivers feel about interacting with an AV (Tennant et al., 2016). The study yielded the following results. 44% of the respondents stated they would feel uncomfortable about using an AV while 41% stated they would feel uncomfortable about driving alongside an AV. Although 43% of the users agreed that AVs would be safer than human driven vehicles, a 73% of them fear that AVs could malfunction and 60% believe that AVs would lack the common sense needed to interact with human drivers. Most of the respondents (60%) acknowledged that they don’t know enough about AVs but users became more positive the more they reflected on AVs while responding to the survey. Most of them believe that human should be in control of their vehicles (70%) and AVs should have a steering wheel (80%). 82% of the respondents would prefer to keep attentive to the road situation even when the vehicle is in full control of driving. Users who are more sociable and less optimistic about technology are the least open to AVs and on the contrary, users who have a more combative view of the road and are more technologically optimistic are those more open to AVs. A 34% of respondents said they did not like the idea of mixing human drivers and AVs, with only 20% of users not troubled by the idea.
Also, a recent study based on system demonstrations under real circumstances (Piao et al., 2016) found positive users attitudes towards the implementation of AVs in urban areas, being driven by factors such as lower fares. Concerns about passenger security (e.g. during night time services) were expressed though. Although more than half of the people surveyed stated that they would consider using AVs, only a quarter of the respondents believed AVs would be safer than conventional ones, which indicates low levels of awareness and/or understanding of the technologies and therefore the need for real experiences with the systems. Therefore consumers are gradually building trust on AVs which will eventually have an influence on the adoption rate of these technologies. The more complex a product is, the slower the rate of adoption that can be expected (Karlsson et al., 2011). The easier it is for individuals to see the results of the use of an innovation, the more likely they are to adopt it (Karlsson et al., 2011). Surprisingly, a recent study about users preferences for using AVs in last mile trips (Yap et al., 2016) found that travellers on average associate more disutility to the in-vehicle time in an automatically driven AV, compared to a manually driven AV, which can be possibly explained with the discomfort feeling that travellers might experience when imagining riding in a driverless automobile. Users lacked real experiences with the use of an AV though. This result can also be explained in relation to the fact that they were just considering the use of AVs for the egress part of the whole trip, thus for a relatively short part of the total multimodal trip. User attitudes play an important role in the actual use of AVs as last mile transport mode, e.g. attitudes towards the sustainability of AVs and perception of trust were the most important attitudinal factors for using AVs. Also, the joy of driving is of relevance for users choice of travel mode, which is reflected in users favouring the choice of the manually driven AV. Contrary to what was initially expected, attitudes regarding service reliability and work productivity had a secondary role in the total utility, indicating that the potential advantages of using an AV are not perceived by today’s travellers. The study suggests to incorporate these psychological factors before and during the implementation process of AVs, as they may have a great influence on users’ future adoption of the technologies.
Similarly, connected vehicles face potential barriers from the users’ side. A study on the quality of transport (European Commission, 2014b) found that 41% of respondents would not be willing to connect their vehicles. Of those who would be willing to have a connected vehicle (51%), a 38% stated that this would be conditional to data anonymity or the possibility to decide when to be connected. A more recent survey (Mobile World Live, 2017) found that a 60% of the respondents expected connected car roll-outs to be well underway within two years from 2016 and a 36.4% of them stated that deployments were already happening in their countries. Although network technology was not seen as a significant issue (only 11.6% of respondents identified insufficient bandwidth or throughput as an issue), a 36.6% of them identified irregular network coverage as the main connectivity
deficiency that has potential to hold the market back. Security is seen as a concern, with a majority (60%) agreeing with the statement: “I don’t know how to secure my connected car application or where my weak links are”.
The Fraunhofer IAO (Dungs et al., 2016), in collaboration with management consultants Horváth & Partners, surveyed 1,500 motorists as part of the "Value of Time" study regarding their willingness to pay for in-car value-added services. Based on the results of the survey each motorist is willing to pay on average 20 and 40 euros per month for value- added services in an AV. The more popular automated driving becomes, the greater the demand by users for services to meaningfully utilize the time freed up in the car. Offers related to service and communication are the most heavily in demand though with different variations. For example, interest in in-car social media services is much higher in Japan than in Germany (64% compared with 23%). Finally, the willingness to pay for services related to AVs reduces significantly from the age of 35 but it is not related to the vehicles segment, i.e. whether the motorist is a driver of small, mid-sized or high-end vehicle.