The Role of Human Operators in Safety Perception of AV Deployment—Insights from a Large European Survey

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles are anticipated to play an important role on future mobility offering encouraging solutions to today’s transport problems. However, concerns of the public, which can affect the AVs’ uptake, are yet to be addressed. This study presents relevant findings of an online survey in eight European countries. First, 1639 responses were collected in Spring 2020 on people’s commute, preferred transport mode, willingness to use AVs and demographic details. Data was analyzed for the entire dataset and for vulnerable road users in particular. Results re-confirm the long-lasting discourse on the importance of safety on the acceptance of AVs. Spearman correlations show that age, gender, education level and number of household members have an impact on how people may be using or allowing their children to use the technology, e.g., with or without the presence of a human supervisor in the vehicle. Results on vulnerable road users show the same trend. The elderly would travel in AVs with the presence of a human supervisor. People with disabilities have the same proclivity, however their reactions were more conservative. Next to safety, reliability, affordability, cost, driving pleasure and household size may also impact the uptake of AVs and shall be considered when designing relevant policies.

Who Is Willing to Share Their AV? Insights about Gender Differences among Seven Countries

“…Nazari et al [56] found that young males are more likely to switch to AV compared to conventional vehicles, whereas older users are more likely to switch to SAV, although Laidlaw [57] concluded that young adults are more willing to pay for an AV and to use an SAV. Moreover, household car availability is a crucial factor, since Menon et al [58] found that although single-car households may replace the sole car with an SAV service, multiple-car households may only dispose of one of their cars with an SAV service. However, age and car use are directly linked with each other, since younger and elderly travellers show lower levels of driving licence holding.…”

Attitudes Toward Four Levels of Self-Driving Technology Among Elderly Drivers

“…An elderly driver using his or her car only for short shopping trips might not see this new technology as necessary as being as someone with high mileage in various conditions. Since it can be expected that income is related to willingness to pay for ADS (Kyriakidis et al, 2020 ; Zandieh and Acheampong, 2021 ), in this study, the cost of ADAS and ADS features were defined as “cost-free” in order to eliminate the effect of socio-economic background. While this constraint might be theoretically sound, it is still possible that the cost of new technology plays a role in preferences.…”

“…Previous research has also found that younger drivers were more interested in using self-driving technology and that younger drivers were prepared to pay more for this technology than older drivers (Kyriakidis et al, 2015 ; Bansal et al, 2016 ; Hohenberger et al, 2016 ). A recent survey conducted in eight European countries showed that the elderly are concerned mostly about the safety of automated driverless vehicles and would prefer to travel in autonomous vehicles with the presence of a human supervisor (Kyriakidis et al, 2020 ). Similar findings showing that older and disabled persons are more concerned about reliability and safety of the autonomous vehicles, than younger and non-disabled persons, have been found in several earlier studies (Nielsen and Haustein, 2018 ; Gabrhel et al, 2019 ; Huff et al, 2019 ; Liu et al, 2019 ; Robertson et al, 2019 ; Liang et al, 2020 ).…”

“…The cost of automatization also seems to concern older people. In addition to concerns for safety, elderly citizens are less willing to pay for automatization or worried about the cost (Kyriakidis et al, 2020 ; Zandieh and Acheampong, 2021 ). In a telephone survey study among 501 older (≥65 years) adults, 78.2% of the respondents stated that they would not pay any additional amount for the driverless features (Oxley et al, 2019 ).…”

Sjálfakandi ökutæki á Íslandi: Viðhorf almennings gagnvart nýjum ferðamáta

“…Spurningalistanum var dreift hérlendis til félagsmanna Verkfraeðingafélags Íslands, starfsfólks Vegagerðarinnar, starfsfólks Skipulagsstofnunar, starfsfólks og nemenda Háskóla Íslands, starfsfólks og nemenda Landbúnaðarháskóla Íslands, aðildarfyrirtaekja Bílgreinasambandsins og fleiri aðila auk persónulegra tengiliða höfunda skv Thomopoulos et al (2020)…”