Consumers’ expectations and attitudes towards owning, sharing, and riding autonomous vehicles

Abstract

It is still unclear whether autonomous vehicles will mainly bring benefits or not to the sustainable development of people's mobility. Opinion among various stakeholders diverge since autonomous driving may have different use cases, and potential impacts will depend on how consumers will deal with it: following an ownership-based or a consumption-based approach, using autonomous vehicles as individual (as a private car), shared (as a taxi service), or collective (as a public transport service) means of transport. This paper aims at shedding light on future mobility scenarios by investigating travelers’ expectations, attitudes, and intentions towards adopting autonomous vehicles. The research method involves the estimation of hybrid choice models based on data collected through a Stated Intention survey. Results of an exploratory study conducted in Italy show that the willingness-to-adopt autonomous vehicles can be explained by both observable and latent traits of individuals, giving evidence of different policy implications. Moreover, the desire to experiment autonomous driving is on average very high, but consumers are more willing to share or ride autonomous vehicles, rather than purchasing them for personal use.