Giving Up Control: The Role of Automation Level, Data Processing, and Network in Autonomous Vehicles Acceptance
(A2021-93420)

AUTHORS

Julien Cloarec, Université Laval; Lars Meyer-Waarden, Toulouse School of Management Research -CNRS University Toulouse 1 Capitole; Nina de Ona, Statista

ABSTRACT

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are disrupting the car industry. Our paper displays two studies with mixed-method research methodologies to gather insights on users’ acceptance and behavioral attitudes towards AVs. For the first study, we used a bottom-up method to analyze the answers and generate topics. We thus created a structural model that we analyzed through a Structural Equation Model method to try to analyze respondents’ sentiment and to predict their purchase intentions. We obtained interesting insights on how Level impacts the topic of Anxiety and how the topic of Anxiety, Technology control, and Fear influence respondents’ sentiment. For the second study, participants were given a questionnaire gathering Technology anxiety, Perceived safety, Technology trust, Effort expectancy, Performance expectancy. We found that the Network chosen for processing the data generated by AVs has importance for participants and impacts their willingness to use AVs.