Use cases

Among the first larger research activities that has dealt with autonomous driving from a wider perspective was the “Villa Ladenburg” project (2012-2015). Central aspects of the project included potential future users of autonomous vehicles and possible implications for the transport system. “Villa Ladenburg” was funded by the Daimler and Benz foundation, and convened an international network of renowned experts from various disciplines. The results of this work were published in a comprehensive compendium in German in 2015 (publicly available online: http://www.springer.com/de/book/9783662458532). An English version will be available around March 2016.
Associated with the “Villa Ladenburg” project, an online survey with 1,000 respondents in Germany was conducted in April 2014. Its aim was to gather use-case-oriented mindsets concerning acceptance, mode choice, and time use related to expectations, desires, reservations, and fears concerning autonomous driving. Above all, we wanted to find out what the respondents imagine their mobility and transport behavior to be like in specific “what if…” scenarios. To what extent the respondents could actually imagine themselves in a future with autonomous vehicles is an important aspect in this early stage of technology development and implementation.
Autonomous driving, in relation to its potential types of application and potential users, implicates changes on various levels, be it transport behavior, modifications in mindsets towards the use and ownership of cars, or altered use of time while traveling, thus indicating changes in terms of future activities. An interdisciplinary approach that includes perspectives from transport and mobility research, psychology, and social sciences is required to adequately address this topic, where still little is known and many questions remain unanswered. In the survey, we therefore applied a mix of methods to deal with these uncertainties. For example, we thought open-answer options in the form of free-text boxes a suitable addition to the standardized, quantitative questions, thus giving respondents an additional opportunity for more spontaneous reactions towards autonomous driving. At the same time, we put an emphasis on different use cases representing likely application scenarios of autonomous driving.
The following results present initial, careful quantifications in a field, where many questions are still do be addressed. However, a focus on user perspectives on autonomous driving is crucial for a successful implementation of the technology into our transport system in the future.