Cross-Cultural Expectations from Self-Driving Cars

Abstract

International adoption of autonomous vehicles has been in the center of attention in academia and industry. This paper therefore proposes to shed light on cross-cultural expectations of autonomous vehicles. We utilized a survey with 57 questions prepared in English, German, and Spanish languages that asked 157 participants about their personal driving behaviors as well as their expectations from self-driving cars. Several novel behavior and AI trust metrics are generated from the responses that show clear differences in expectations of autonomous technologies depending on the demographic sampled. These results show significant differences in expected self-driving car aggressiveness as it relates to their own driving behavior with most people surveyed preferring a driving style more conservative than their own; interestingly, by filtering the aforementioned distribution into those more trustful of AI the expected self-driving car aggressiveness is more similar to their own driving style. This paper also finds that the level of trust attributed to an autonomous vehicle to perform a given task depends heavily on the task and its importance to the demographic being questioned. Future research may be able to use these insights to address problems of trust between passengers and self-driving cars, social acceptability of self-driving cars, and development of customized autonomous driving technologies.