On the Passenger Acceptance of Driverless Shuttles

Driverless vehicles, either for personal or public transport, are expected to increase safety; decrease waiting and travel time; as well as provide free on-board time to the passengers. System acceptance will be strongly linked to the platform ability to remove any uncomfortable sensation on-board, i.e. the capacity to transform users’ expectations into vehicle response. This paper presents the feedback from 30 users after experiencing a driverless shuttle on real roads. Two different lateral controllers and a longitudinal one were proposed. Results show 80%, 72% and 62% user acceptance (i.e. agree or strongly agree responses) in straight stretches, roundabouts and pedestrian crossings respectively for the longitudinal shuttle behavior. Users agree or strongly agree with the lateral controller performance in an 83% and 90% for the path-tracker and predictive-tracker configurations respectively. These results provide some insights about future directions on the development of fully automated shuttles for increasing users’ acceptance.