Building the UK vision of a driverless future: A Parliamentary Inquiry case study

Abstract

The UK Government has endorsed the case for autonomous vehicle (AV) technology and its economic benefits in its industrial strategies since 2013. In late 2016 the Science and Technology Committee in the House of Lords (the legislature’s upper chamber) conducted an Inquiry into the policy. We conduct a content analysis of the text corpus of the Inquiry. Drawing from theories of sociotechnical change we explore how it contributes to building a vision of a future AV world embedded in a national economic and technological project. The technology is framed as a solution to societal grand challenges and the Inquiry corpus is dominated by actors committed to the project. Alternative visions, including sceptical interpretations, are present in the corpus, but rare, reflecting the selection process for contributions to the Inquiry. Predominantly, the corpus represents the public as deficient: dangerous drivers, unaware of promised benefits and unduly anxious about the unfamiliar. Their views are marginal in this Parliamentary Inquiry’s findings. AV technology is one of several possible means to pursue wider mobility policy goals of greater safety, affordability, access and sustainability. Our analysis suggests that the pursuit of an AV future risks becoming a goal in itself instead of a means to these broader societal goals.

Imaginaries of Road Transport Automation in Finnish Governance Culture—A Critical Discourse Analysis

“…The imagined implementations are also very similar to those that have for some years now circulated in the automation discourse, underlining the inherent supranationality of the phenomenon [44,97,102,106]. In terms of the whole development process, we can see similar threats related to lack of inclusivity, democracy, diversity, and transparency that have been reported elsewhere [27,29,31,41]. Thus, the lessons we offer for the Finnish governance regime in the next section could be interpreted also in different contexts.…”

“…Overall, our findings align well with the findings of previous research. Similarly to the UK and Germany [29,31], the Finnish stakeholders fail to acknowledge citizens as cocreators of an automated mobility future, although the importance of generating acceptance is stressed. Similarly to Norway, little emphasis is placed on actual implementations or the spatial and cultural realities, whereas economic gain and improvement of the transport sector are emphasised [22].…”

“…The discourse stresses the importance of participation in generating acceptance, but simultaneously the public is reduced to merely a recipient of the supposedly correct information instead of an active co-creator of the emerging technology. Tennant et al [31] reported convergent findings to Graf and Sonnberger from a UK corpus analysis: the public is presented as deficient, ignorant, and fearful of that which they do not properly understand. In addition, the authors illustrate how a limited, selective, and relatively homogenous group of stakeholders seek to construct a narrative, where self-driving technologies are presented as inevitable and desirable.…”

“…Therefore, deeper governance analysis needs to focus on how imaginaries are constructed, articulated, interpreted, and mediated in official documents and how these practices relate to broader developments in sociotechnical regimes. Previous literature has already identified a set of such discourse-based sociotechnical imaginaries of transport automation [9,22,[28][29][30][31]. However, while often successful in tapping into certain local specificities, the literature has, for the most part, settled on describing the characteristics and origins of the discourse, whereas the possible implications of the discourse are not contemplated as rigorously.…”

Influences of Autonomous Vehicles on Sustainability: A Systematic Literature Review

“…The existing infrastructure does not need to be changed for this. This is mainly because the use of the latest technologies could reduce congestion and improve traffic management in the city as a whole (Barron, 2022;Bucchiarone et al, 2021;Kacperski et al, 2020;Kuru & Khan, 2021;Mora et al, 2020;Tennant et al, 2021;Zhu et al, 2023). This increase in productivity means that the time saved on travel could be used for other things, which in turn would improve quality of life (Mora et al, 2020;Ng & Kim, 2020).…”