User acceptance and ethics of ITS Chapter | 7 87to the same survey, the elder and younger population groups (above 60 and
between 18 and 25 years) are most willing to pay for driver assistance systems.
A similar UK-based survey on transportation experts (Begg, 2014) shows
a significant acceptance of AVs, with 28% of the participants to believe that
“eyes-off” vehicles (autonomy Level 3) will be on the roads by 2040 and 25%
of the participants to believe that autonomy will improve road safety. A trans-
national study in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia (Schoettle
& Sivak, 2014) showed that people are willing to adopt self-driving vehicles,
but are still hesitant because of the high cost. The participants from the United
States are mostly concerned about data privacy, the interaction of self-driving
cars with normal cars and their performance in bad weather conditions. All par-
ticipants were highly concerned about unoccupied self-driving vehicles and the
use of self-driving in public transportation. The survey of Underwood (2014)
on the 217 participants of a symposium on automated vehicles revealed several
legal and regulatory barriers to the deployment of AVs, which are much harder
to overcome than gaining social acceptance. The survey of Kyriakidis, Happee,
and de Winteret (2015) on five thousand people from more than 100 countries
indicated a higher potential acceptance for fully than for partially automated
driving, since Level 5 is perceived easier than Level 3 that requires driver's at-
tention and responsibility. Although the responders are concerned about safety
and security they would be willing to pay more for fully autonomous driving
and are expecting AVs to gain half of the market by 2050. The study of Payre,
Cestac, and Delhomme (2014) in 400 French drivers with a positive stance
against AV technology verified their high interest on fully automated driving
(the two-thirds of them scored 4 out of 7 on an interest scale), but are still not
ready to pay for such technology.
The crossgender study of Hohenberger, Spörrle, and Welpe (2016) revealed
that men are most willing to pay and use autonomous vehicles than women
and a similar study in Israel (Haboucha, Ishaq, & Shiftan, 2017 ) revealed that
men prefer to combine autonomous vehicles with car sharing and find them a
better alternative than driving private vehicles. The same study showed that a
higher education level is associated with a higher acceptance of autonomous
and shared vehicles.
Despite the numerous surveys and studies on the public acceptance of ve-
hicle automation and self-driving vehicles, the real intention of consumers is not
yet clear. For this reason, Osswald, et al. (2012) developed the Car Technology
Acceptance Model, which is a specialization of the Unified Theory of Accep-
tance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) on the domain of AVs, which examines
several additional concerns related to driving, such as safety and accountability.
However, the effect of the model factors on the consumers’ intentions to ride,
buy, or drive an autonomous vehicle is not studied. The study of Madigan et al.
(2016), who employed the UTAUT acceptance model to evaluate end-users’
intentions toward Automated Road Transport Systems in France and Switzer-
land, revealed that the user expectancies for the performance, the facilitation it