You and your autopilot – how consumers perceive semi-autonomous cars

According to a recent study, the #TestingAutomation consumer survey, commissioned in 2018 by Thatcham Research, 71% of drivers around the world believe they can purchase a self-driving car right now, while 11% would be tempted to have a brief nap while using current ‘Highway Assist’ systems such as Adaptive Cruise Control (Thatcham Research 2018). In reality, autonomous (i.e. driverless) cars are not yet on the market and still in an exploratory testing phase (Ro and Ha 2019); however, most major car manufacturers are developing vehicles with some level of automated driving capability (Hardman et al. 2019). AV technology is considered to have a major impact on the transportation system and to substantially affect road safety, mobility, traffic congestion, and energy use (Anderson et al., 2016; Sener et al. 2019; Xu et al. 2018). As AV technology is gaining increasing attention among car manufacturers, technology companies, policymakers, and the general public (Xu et al. 2018), researchers in different disciplines have also started to focus their attention on examining consumers’ attitudes and perceptions of AV technologies and the factors that shape the potential adoption of conditional and/or full automated vehicles. There is consensus that the literature on consumers’ adoption behavior towards AV is still limited (Hardman et al. 2019; Leicht et al. 2018; Shabanpour et al. 2018; Xu et al. 2018). In this article, we explore consumers’ psychological drivers behind AV acceptance as part of a larger research project on automation. Prior research (Walker et al. 2018) suggests that people with an on-road driving experience with a semi-autonomous car (SAE Level 2) obtain a more realistic understanding of AV technology. In this study, we analyze how an on-road experience with a Level 2 semi-autonomous vehicle influences drivers’ trust beliefs and acceptance of autonomous cars