Public Opinion on Automated Driving: Results of an International Questionnaire Among 5,000 Respondents
Summary (3 min read)
1. Introduction
- Road transport is an essential service in society, but the burden of traffic crashes and pollution is immense.
- In 2012, the US petroleum use for road transportation was about 11 million barrels per day, which corresponds to approximately 60% of the total US petroleum consumption (Davis, Diegel, & Boundy, 2014) .
- Current trends indicate that road traffic injuries will become the fifth leading cause of death by 2030, with the difference between high-and low-income countries further magnified (World Health Organization, 2013) .
- Automated driving systems have the potential to resolve these problems by increasing safety on public roads while decreasing traffic congestion, gas emissions, and fuel consumption (Anderson et al., 2014) .
- All three classifications start from the manual driving mode, where the driver executes all driving tasks, and each moves toward the fully automated driving mode, where no manual interaction is involved.
1.1. Previous surveys on automated driving
- The experts expressed the opinion that the ACC would be installed in 5% of the vehicles by 2004, while it would reach 50% of market penetration by 2015.
- The positive responses dropped to 20% after the respondents were informed about the estimated market price of $3000.
- Results of these two surveys were in close agreement with the original survey.
Levels of automation
- A survey carried out by Continental AG (Sommer, 2013) in Germany, China, Japan, and US pointed out that 59% of the respondents considered automated driving a useful advancement.
- Furthermore, the study suggested that half of the older respondents (aged 55+) believed that driverless technology is not important compared to under a third of the respondents between 16 and 24 years old.
- Casley et al. (2013) carried out a survey on the public opinion of fully automated vehicles among 467 students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
- 28% of the respondents indicated that the Level-3 automated vehicles will be commonplace on UK roads not earlier than 2040, while the number of those believed that this would never happen increased to 20%.
- A recent study by Schoettle and Sivak (2014a) investigated the public opinion (N = 1533) about autonomous and self-driving vehicles in the US, the UK, and Australia.
1.2. The aim of our survey study
- As described above, experts and the public are often positive about automated driving, but also exhibit essential concerns.
- The authors used the CrowdFlower crowdsourcing service, a tool which has been used for previous traffic psychology survey research as well (De Winter, Kyriakidis, Dodou, & Happee, 2015) .
- Third, since the previous survey studies on automated driving did not investigate how personality traits associate with the opinion of people on automated driving, this study explores associations with a well-known personality test, the Big Five Inventory (John & Srivastava, 1999) .
2.1. Survey
- A 63-question survey was created on http://www.crowdflower.com.
- The research was approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) of the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft).
- The system cannot handle all possible situations.
- The system takes over speed and steering control completely and permanently, on all roads and in all situations.
- The survey asked for age, gender, driving frequency, mileage, accident involvement, and preferences/worries regarding manual driving, partially automated driving, highly automated driving, and fully automated driving.
2.2. CrowdFlower settings
- In the instructions, the respondents were informed that they would need approximately 15 min to complete the survey.
- The task expiration time was set at 60 min.
- In order to collect data from an as large and diverse as possible population, no requirements regarding the respondents' country of residence were set.
- Furthermore, the authors opted for 'Level 1 contributors', which is the lowest of the three available levels, accounting for 60% of CrowdFlower's monthly completed work.
- For the completion of the survey a payment of $0.30 was offered, and 5000 responses were collected.
2.3. Analyses at the individual level
- Descriptive statistics (i.e., means, medians, standard deviations, and frequencies) were calculated for each of the variables, as shown in the Supplementary Materials (Table S1 ).
- In turn, Spearman correlation coefficients were calculated (criterion for statistical significance at p < 0.001) between age, gender, mileage, driving frequency, computer use, education, income, accidents, disability, ACC use, and personality, on the one hand, and the level of enjoyment, comfort, willingness to pay, and worries about automated driving, on the other.
3.1. Number of respondents and respondent satisfaction
- In total, 5000 people completed the survey.
- CrowdFlower allows respondents to provide satisfaction ratings regarding the completed job.
- Table 2 shows that the respondents were generally satisfied with both the overall survey and its specifics.
3.2. Data filtering
- The respondents who did not indicate that they had read the instructions (N = 102) were excluded from the analyses.
- Those who indicated they were under 18 (N = 13), thereby not adhering to the survey instructions, were also excluded.
- In addition, one person whose responses were not stored correctly in the CrowdFlower database had to be discarded.
- Accordingly, 114 unique respondents were removed, leaving 4886 respondents for further analysis.
- An internal validity check revealed good correlation between self-reported age and self-reported birth date (Spearman's q = À0.99; after excluding 3 people who reported they were over 115 years old, and 49 people who reported they were born before 1900 or after 2010).
3.3. Analyses at the individual level: responses
- Descriptive statistics for the 4886 respondents are listed in Table S1 .
- Considering the large sample size, virtually all of the differences in means between pairs of questions were statistically significant.
- A majority of the respondents (2505 people, 51%) indicated that automated driving would be so advanced in 30 years that they would not even be allowed to drive manually (Q31).
- Privacy was their smallest concern, yet people were still quite concerned about it.
- The results reveal a substantial increase in the number of the people who would intend to rest/sleep, watch movies, or read, while driving in fully automated mode compared to the highly automated driving mode.
3.4. Correlational analyses at the individual level
- Table 3 summarises the correlation matrix of the variables.
- Neither clear age effects (Q7) nor gender effects (Q8) were identified (absolute correlation coefficients were mostly smaller than 0.10).
- These findings mirror the literature, as presented in the introduction.
- Additionally, the respondents who drive more (Q10, Q11) were also willing to pay more (Q42-45), for both their next vehicle and for automated driving vehicles.
- Nonetheless, it was found that respondents who scored higher on neuroticism were less comfortable with data transmitting (Q32-36), while respondents who scored higher on agreeableness were more comfortable with that, and believed that automation is less silly (Q30).
3.5. Correlational analyses at the national level
- The 4886 respondents were from 109 different countries.
- Overall, the developmental status of a country (either expressed in accident statistics, educational performance, or GDP per person) is predictive of various automation-related results (Table 4 ).
- There are no statistically significant relationships between the countries' income level and the respondents' willingness to pay for partially, highly, or fully automated vehicles (Q43-45).
- Further cross-national correlations indicate that in countries with higher educational performance and income, there were more female respondents (Q8) and respondents of greater age (Q7).
- A further validation of CrowdFlower results is obtained by the correlations between registered accidents and self-reported accidents (q = 0.54/0.52, Q22).
4. Discussion
- Various recent studies have documented the public opinion on automated driving technology.
- Specifically, the authors found that people who drive more, would be willing to pay more for automated vehicles.
- In conclusion, there appears to be a market for automated driving technologies, but one has to acknowledge that a part of the population is reluctant against such technology.
- That is, citizens of high-income countries may realistically believe that the threat of data misuse exists and is harmful for them.
- Other limitations of cross-national correlations include their relatively small sample size (only 40 countries with at least 25 of respondents per country) and possible non-independence of data points (e.g., adjacent countries may be similar and dependent on each other), according to which the notion of statistical significance can be misleading (Pollet, Tybur, Frankenhuis, & Rickard, 2014) .
Did you find this useful? Give us your feedback
Citations
609 citations
603 citations
Cites background from "Public Opinion on Automated Driving..."
...30 In the past three years, many researchers (Kyriakidis et al. 2014, Schoettle and Sivak 2014a & 31 2014b, Underwood 2014) and consulting firms (J.D. Power....
[...]
...Kyriakidis et al. (2014) conducted a survey of 5,000 respondents across 109 countries by 41 means of a crowd-sourcing internet survey....
[...]
582 citations
486 citations
437 citations
Cites background from "Public Opinion on Automated Driving..."
...…347 adults recruited through neighbourhood associations in Austin, USA (Bansal et al., 2016); 1661 adults in Great Britain recruited via internet polling company YouGov (Smith, 2016); and 4886 adults from 109 countries recruited through crowdsourcing company CrowdFlower (Kyriakidis et al., 2015)....
[...]
...Some surveys have been conducted in recent years on the public’s perception of autonomous cars, but have typically focused on people as users of such vehicles (Bansal et al., 2016; JD Power, 2013; Kyriakidis et al., 2015; Schoettle and Sivak, 2014; Smith, 2016)....
[...]
...Further online surveys have been conducted subsequently with samples of the public in different parts of the world: for example, 347 adults recruited through neighbourhood associations in Austin, USA (Bansal et al., 2016); 1661 adults in Great Britain recruited via internet polling company YouGov (Smith, 2016); and 4886 adults from 109 countries recruited through crowdsourcing company CrowdFlower (Kyriakidis et al., 2015)....
[...]
References
18,001 citations
7,787 citations
5,061 citations
2,985 citations
"Public Opinion on Automated Driving..." refers methods or result in this paper
...would be able to drive on public roads by 2030 (median response), which is in agreement with the findings presented by Underwood (2014) and De Winter et al....
[...]
...would be able to drive on public roads by 2030 (median response), which is in agreement with the findings presented by Underwood (2014) and De Winter et al. (2015). However, our findings are more optimistic than Begg (2014), who found that only 10% of the respondents believed Level-4 NHTSA automation would be commonplace on UK roads by 2030....
[...]
...Finally, the personality characteristics of the respondents were measured using a 10-item version of the Big Five Inventory (BFI) introduced by Rammstedt and John (2007), which in turn was derived from John and Srivastava (1999)....
[...]
2,386 citations
Related Papers (5)
Frequently Asked Questions (14)
Q2. What were the main expected benefits of self-driving vehicles?
The main expected benefits of self-driving vehicles included crash reduction (70% of responses), reduction of emissions (64%), and reduced fuel consumption (72%).
Q3. How many responses could be included in the statistical analyses?
The authors implemented a 63-question survey via the CrowdFlower crowdsourcing service, and the authors collected 5000 responses, 4886 of which could be included in their statistical analyses.
Q4. How many people were concerned about the safety of self-driving vehicles?
In particular, 26% of the US respondents were ‘‘very concerned’’ about system/equipment failure and vehicle performance in unexpected situations, while the corresponding percentages for UK and Australia were 15% and 16% respectively.
Q5. What is the role of automated driving systems in solving traffic accidents?
Automated driving systems have the potential to resolve these problems by increasing safety on public roads while decreasing traffic congestion, gas emissions, and fuel consumption (Anderson et al., 2014).
Q6. How many people were positive to self-driving cars?
More than 40% of the respondents were positive to either purchasing self-driving technology in their next vehicle or equipping their current vehicle with such technology.
Q7. How many people believed that the Level-3 would never happen?
28% of the respondents indicated that the Level-3 automated vehicles will be commonplace on UK roads not earlier than 2040, while the number of those believed that this would never happen increased to 20%.
Q8. How many respondents would be willing to pay more than $30,000 for fully automated driving?
240 respondents (4.9%) indicated they would be willing to pay more than $30,000 for fully automated driving, compared to only 117 and 154 respondents for partially and highly automated driving, respectively.
Q9. What was the first study to examine the use of autonomous driving?
Their first study (Power, 2012), conducted in March 2012, surveyed 17,400 vehicle owners regarding their intention to purchase an autonomous driving mode, defined as ‘‘a feature that allows the vehicle to take control of acceleration, braking and steering, without any human interaction’’. 37% of the respondents answered that they ‘‘would definitely’’ or ‘‘would probably’’ be interested in purchasing such technology.
Q10. How many Chinese and Indian respondents expressed interest in self-driving vehicles?
a large number of Chinese and Indian respondents (76% and 80% respectively) expressed interest in acquiring such technology on their personal vehicles, compared to only 41% of the Japanese respondents.
Q11. How many people agreed that self-driving vehicles would improve safety for all road users?
Results revealed that 36% and 24% of respondents agreed and strongly agreed, respectively, that automated vehicles would improve safety for all road users.
Q12. What are the limitations of cross-national correlations?
Other limitations of cross-national correlations include their relatively small sample size (only 40 countries with at least 25 of respondents per country) and possible non-independence of data points (e.g., adjacent countries may be similarand dependent on each other), according to which the notion of statistical significance can be misleading (Pollet, Tybur, Frankenhuis, & Rickard, 2014).
Q13. How much would the population be willing to pay for a fully automated car?
At the same time, there is a fair part of the population who will enjoy fully automated driving, and about 5% would be willing to pay even more than $30,000 to purchase it.
Q14. How many people believe fully automated driving will reach a 50% market share?
In conclusion, their survey showed that 69% of people believe that fully automated driving will reach a 50% market share between now and 2050 (cf. Fig. 6).