Driverless cars: Negotiating a place on the road

Driverless cars, also known as Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) – are they safer, lifestyle enhancing and economically efficient? Or are they lacking in common sense and a potential nuisance? The challenge is not simply to ensure AVs avoid colliding with other drivers: they need to satisfy other drivers that they are competent at negotiating their place in the social space that is the road.

Will different drivers have different views on AVs?

Different approaches to the task of driving may have a link to how accepting you are of AVs. This is one of the findings from the latest research by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. Building on research completed in 2015, where LSE and Goodyear studied the “unwritten” rules of the road and how drivers interact with each other, this latest piece of research reports on how drivers imagine they will interact with AVs. From this researchers have assessed how open people are to the prospect of sharing the road with AVs.

How do you feel about driving alongside a driverless car?

This was one of the research questions asked to gauge respondents’ readiness to share the road with AVs. More respondents felt uncomfortable driving alongside an AV (41%) than totally comfortable (29%). This trend was repeated for the question “How would you feel about using an AV?”, where 44% felt uncomfortable, compared to 26% that felt comfortable.

Research was carried out by conducting focus groups in four European countries, with a total of 48 participants. This was in addition to an online survey of approximately 12,000 respondents from 11 European countries.

Who has seen an AV?

A key argument made for AVs is that ‘Most accidents are caused by human error so autonomous vehicles would be safer’; but fewer than half of the survey respondents agreed with this statement. However, a majority of participants feared that AVs could malfunction and had a lack of common sense on the road. Clearly, one explanation of this caution could be a lack of familiarity with the technology. Few people have sat in an AV and many have never seen a test vehicle on the road. When asked to think about the reason behind their opinions, the majority of survey respondents reported that they “didn’t know enough about how driverless cars work”.

However, the research found that participants’ attitudes to the task of driving are linked to how open they are to the prospect of sharing the road with AVs. In particular, some drivers were more comfortable than others with the need to interact socially with other drivers to negotiate their place on the road: other drivers experience the road more as somewhere to do battle with other drivers.

What would it be like to interact with an AV?

Researchers reported an association between sociability, technological optimism and openness to AVs.

Generally speaking, we found that the respondents least open to AVs are those who are more sociable drivers with lower optimism about technology on average. By contract, the people more open to AVs are those who have a more “combative” view of the road and are more technologically optimistic on average.

One implication of this is that drivers who are comfortable negotiating their space on the road with other human drivers may be wary about negotiating with an AV. More “combative” drivers may actually think AVs are easier agents to deal with on the road than other humans.

Conclusions

There are a wide range of factors influencing the acceptance of this new technology into a social space. Drivers have strong feelings about how the AVs should behave on the road.

Ultimately, both the survey and focus groups emphasised the need to take into account respondents’ real concern over AVs’ ability to integrate with the social space of the road successfully.

It is necessary to understand these reservations, rather than just assume that the public needs more information if AVs are to negotiate a place for themselves on the road.

Driverless cars: Negotiating a place on the road