Understanding Receptivity to Increasing Vehicle Autonomy

Fully Autonomous Vehicles (FAVs) are expected to reshape transportation systems by providing safer and more efficient travel, but their advantages do not guarantee the public acceptance that is critical to their widespread deployment. The existing literature provides illuminating insights into factors that drive the adoption of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), but it fails to explain how the public’s perception of them shifts as the level of autonomy increases. To fill this knowledge gap, we developed and distributed a survey questionnaire that was designed to reveal how demographics and attitudinal factors influence automation preferences, then employed non-parametric statistical tests to analyze the 295 valid responses. The findings indicated an overall preference for manual vehicles, followed by partially AVs and FAVs. The Kruskal-Wallis H and Mann-Whitney U tests did not reveal any significant variations in the partial automation rankings, which suggests that individuals across different demographic groups have similar perceptions of this level of automation. Contrastingly, age, gender, race, and prior exposure to AVs were significant for rankings of both manual vehicles and FAVs. The Spearman’s rank correlation analysis revealed a mirrored trend across attitudinal factors when comparing rankings for manual vehicles and FAVs, while preferences for partial automation were not strongly influenced by attitudes. This study underscores the importance of public receptivity to FAVs and may benefit policymakers by enhancing their understanding of prospective users’ perceptions, thus facilitating the integration of FAVs into existing transportation systems.