Estimated years until the acceptance and adoption of automated vehicles and the willingness to pay for them in Germany : focus on age and gender

Kurzfassung/Abstract

Automated vehicles (AVs) are expected to enter the market within the next few years. However, their introduction would not only be a technological, but also a societal one – and it is therefore crucial to examine the public’s attitudes, opinions, and beliefs about AVs. It is particularly interesting to study when AVs are estimated to be accepted and adopted, and to query the willingness to pay for them. Hence, we applied a mixed-methods approach to collect quantitative and qualitative data and carried out a cross-sectional survey study. We focused on collecting an almost balanced sample across age and gender from 725 respondents (351 female, 374 male) with an age range from 18 to 96 years. Our results revealed that AVs are estimated to be accepted and adopted in about 10 years at SAE level L3 and in about 20 years at L5. Moreover, on average we found that the participants would be willing to pay 10.6 % more for an AV at L3 and 14.5 % at L5, but those estimates are affected by large outlier values. Nevertheless, we also observed that between 40 and 33 % of women and 41 and 33 % of men would not be willing to pay any more for an AV neither at L3 nor at L5, respectively. Ultimately, manufacturers and policymakers will have to take these findings into account if they really want to establish AVs as a widespread technological and societal revolution.