Design for a future with driverless vehicles – acceptance and adoption

Abstract

As driverless vehicle technology approaches maturity, it is not clear whether the mindset of individuals and society is ready to accommodate and adopt the advantages and challenges of large-scale driverless vehicle use. The researchers and designers working at the Intelligent Mobility Design Centre of the Royal College of Art have been conducting people centred research to gather expressed and unarticulated viewpoints, hopes and fears of enthusiastic and reluctant driverless car adopters and opponents. We track their expectations of the possible futures of in-car life in driverless vehicles for the purpose of generating driverless car designs to satisfy individual car users’ demands. We have discovered that people often think of shared driverless vehicles (the car pool model) when they envision a driverless future, however there is significant demand for privately owned driverless vehicles for the exclusive use of their owners to satisfy users need for ‘individual space’ and ‘me time’ during journeys. Furthermore, there are many people motivated by the ‘joy of driving’ who are not willing to be deprived of this core emotion by fully autonomous car designs all of the time. This chapter presents the results of our studies of individual people’s attitudes responding to common trends in driverless vehicle research, exploring their expectations and concerns through user generated sketches and prose. We introduce our design solutions for a range of driverless vehicle scenarios from the use of smart suspension to support those with reduced mobility, to using travel time for meditation, even the use of driverless vehicles to walk the dog! We will discuss the different possible shared driverless vehicle models and what ownership means to people, and how human centred design processes can help identify the buy-in point for sharing by showing some adaptive car design concepts designed to be attractive to, and easily adopted by, individual consumers. Finally, the chapter discusses a design-led road map for driverless vehicles by considering economic, political, social/individual, and environmental issues, balancing technological capability with consumer concern, providing a bottom-up view point for reference.