Driverless Futures: A Survey of Public Attitudes, 2021-2022

A set of surveys of public attitudes to issues around self-driving vehicles. Our major sample is from the UK public, with a smaller US sample and a small group of expert respondents for comparison. Background The prospect of self-driving vehicles on our roads has attracted considerable public attention, and private and government investment. As vehicles have started to be tested, it has become clear that their interactions with other road users and broader social implications are complex and potentially controversial. The need for governance is becoming clearer. Questions of how safe the technology needs to be, who is likely to benefit and who should be making decisions are becoming ever more important. At the end of 2021, we surveyed a sample of 4,860 members of the British public to capture their opinions on self-driving vehicles. The survey was part of Driverless Futures? (driverless-futures.com), a project funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, with researchers from University College London, UWE Bristol and City, University of London. Our questions were derived from a set of more than 50 expert interviews and a programme of public dialogue that identified key issues for governance of the technology. Most surveys of public attitudes towards self-driving vehicles have addressed respondents as potential users or consumers of the technology. Our survey is different. We address our respondents as citizens, to ask them how they wish to see the future of mobility. Our respondents all answered most of the survey questions before being divided into five groups for modules on specific topics relating to self-driving vehicles. On some matters our respondents return a clear consensus; on others, opinions are diverse. The range of sentiments include excitement and scepticism about the benefits, the safety, and the wider impacts of introducing self-driving vehicles. We have also fielded this survey in the US (N=1,890) (data collection in February and March 2022) and deployed a shortened version for a convenience sample of 'experts' (N=80).

In the middle of the afternoon on May 7th, 2016, near Williston, Florida, Joshua Brown joined the long list of fatalities on the world's roads. However, his death was different. He was his car's only occupant but, as far as we know, he was not driving. His car was in 'Autopilot' mode. The technology in his Tesla Model S that was designed to keep him safe failed to see a white truck that was crossing his carriageway against the bright white sky behind it. Brown's Tesla hit the trailer at 74mph, after which it left the road and hit a post. Had the car veered left instead of right, crossing onto the opposite carriageway, the world's first fatal self-driving car crash could have caused a higher death toll and even greater controversy. Self-driving cars promise to be one of the most disruptive technologies of the early 21st Century. Enthusiasts for the technology think that it could solve problems such as access to transport for disabled people, traffic jams and hundreds of thousands of deaths on the road each year, most of which are cause by human error. Some companies say they will sell self-driving cars as early as 2018. Governments in the UK and elsewhere see huge potential in securing economic growth and new high-tech jobs for their populations. The UK's Industrial Strategy has prioritised self-driving cars and increased investment in the machine learning technologies that will allow computers to replace humans behind the wheel. Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, forecasts a multi-trillion dollar global market with billions of extra dollars in productivity gains in a 'New Auto Industry Paradigm'. The consultancy firm KPMG calls self-driving cars 'The Next Revolution'. The typical approach to a new technology is for society to understand its effects only in hindsight. For self-driving cars, this would be a bad idea. Policymakers, innovators and the public risk sleepwalking into a future in which technology worsens inequality and loses public trust. The history of the car in the 20th Century shows us that, while technologies can have enormous benefits, they can also cause harm and lock society into new ways of living that then prove hard to change. For self-driving cars, the question is whether we can develop a more alert approach to the technology as it is emerging, before it becomes part of our everyday lives. Rather than innovation being 'driverless', we should look for ways in which innovators and policymakers can take responsibility for the futures they help create. To maximise the public benefits of self-driving cars, we should scrutinise innovations and policies that are currently underway. The engineering of our future transport systems is too important to be left to engineers alone. There is a need for democratic discussion of the opportunities and uncertainties of self-driving cars. Rather than guessing at the hopes and fears of consumers and citizens, we should instead ask people what they really think. In 2017, the House of Lords science and technology committee concluded, "There is a clear need for further Government-commissioned social and economic research to weigh the potential human and financial implications of CAV (Connected and Autonomous Vehicles)." But, while investment in self-driving cars currently totals around $80 billion, there is almost no social science exploring public views about what self-driving cars could mean for the future of transport. This proposal is for the world's first major social science project to bring the public voice into the debate on the future of self-driving cars.