The role of utilitarianism, self-safety, and technology in the acceptance of self-driving cars

Abstract

Self-driving vehicles are currently being developed in major industries for mass public deployment. Their benefits are attractive, and there is interest in having them on the streets as quickly as possible. Delegating responsibility to the cars has far-reaching impacts. As accidents will be unavoidable, the self-driving car will be asked to make life and death decisions that will impact human lives. However, the impact of machine decision making on the overall acceptance of self-driving cars in society is far from sufficiently addressed. The research presented here investigates three factors, i.e., technology, self-safety, and utilitarianism, and hypothesizes their link to self-driving car acceptance. Survey-collected data is statistically analyzed to assess the proposed hypotheses. The empirical outcome of this work shows that the three investigated factors contribute to the societal acceptance of self-driving cars, with technology being the major contributor while the ethical aspects (self-safety and utilitarianism) follow.