Sentiments about autonomous vehicles

Abstract

There is a lot of hype about autonomous vehicles (AV) but there are few studies on how people feel about this innovative product. To fill this research gap and to provide richer insights on this subject, this study crawled 10,374 AV-related comments from a microblogging website and used sentiment analysis to evaluate people’s feelings and perceptions. The results show that people’s sentiments depend not just on the AVs (e.g., their safety and convenience) but also AVs’ impact on society, such as unemployment and legislation. The sentiments therefore transcend beyond individual considerations. The paper discusses the implications of the results and the contributions to the AV literature.