Public perceptions of autonomous vehicle safety: An international comparison

Highlights

• Perceptions of AV safety were surveyed across 41,932 individuals in 51 countries.

• Young, high-income, employed, and highly-educated males are the most optimistic about AV safety.

• Western European countries are aware of AV technology, but are pessimistic about its safety.

• Conversely, developing countries in Asia are the most optimistic about current and future AV safety.

• AV safety optimism in risk-taking individuals and developing countries may reduce global disparity in road safety.

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are envisioned to reduce road fatalities by switching control of safety-critical tasks from humans to machines. Realizing safety benefits on the ground depends on technological advancement as well as the scale and rate of AV adoption, which are influenced by public perceptions. Employing multilevel structural equation modeling, this paper explores differences in perceptions of AV safety across 33,958 individuals in 51 countries. At the individual level, young males report higher perceptions of current AV safety and predict fewer years until AVs are safe enough for them to use. Since young males are more likely to undertake risky driving behavior, their positivity towards AV safety could lead to more rapid manifestations of safety benefits. Urban, fully employed individuals with higher incomes and education levels also report fewer years until AVs are safe to use. The multilevel model identifies country-level effects after controlling for individual characteristics. Developed countries with greater motorization rates and lower road death rates tend to have greater awareness of AVs but are more pessimistic about their present and future safety. Individuals in developing countries that face greater road safety challenges, particularly involving 2- and 3-wheeled vehicles, predict fewer years until AVs will be safe enough for them to use. Higher AV safety perception among the most risk-taking road users and in developing countries coincide with sociodemographic groups and geographic areas facing the greatest road safety challenges and most in need of improvement, highlighting a potential opportunity to reduce the global disparity in road safety.

Introduction

Greater road safety is one of the key potential benefits of autonomous vehicles (AVs) because these systems assume control of safety critical tasks, the type often prone to human error (NHTSA, 2017). Several studies suggest that the potential for improved safety is a key determinant of the general public’s willingness to use AVs (Casley et al., 2013, Howard and Dai, 2014). Therefore, perceptions of AV safety may help determine the extent to which people will accept and use AVs and the rate at which their safety benefits may be realized on the road. However, these findings largely come from data collected in a handful of developed countries¹ and therefore may fail to generalize to developing countries, where road safety is significantly worse. Thus, current literature largely fails to account for how perceptions of AV safety differ across individuals and countries and how those differences may impact the rate and scale of AV adoption.

This study examines perceptions of AV safety across a diverse sample of individuals from a wide variety of countries. Using data from an international survey, this paper explores how awareness of AV technology and perceptions and predictions of AV safety differ across 41,932 individuals in 51 countries. In particular, we investigate what sociodemographic groups (across all countries) demonstrate the most positive current perception and future predictions of AV safety. Controlling for these individual characteristics, we also isolate country-level effects independent of the individuals in those countries and use correlational analysis to understand how country-level factors such as income, car use, and road safety relate to observed variation in country effects on AV safety perceptions.

In this paper, we begin with a literature review of public perceptions of autonomous vehicle safety, with a focus on international comparisons and studies of perceptions of AV safety. Next, we present our methodological approach, providing an overview of our survey, sample, key variables, and modeling framework. We then present the results of our study, including trends across individuals and across countries. Finally, we discuss how the varying perceptions of AV safety demonstrated in our survey may contribute to different rates of AV adoption across countries and, in turn, how this may interact with the existing global road safety disparity between developing and developed countries.