Perception and technology adoption trends for autonomous vehicles: Educational case study

In recent years, self-driving cars have caused substantial attention and discussion. The effects of such autonomous cars on current load of traffic in UAE is a widespread topic in the research community. The literature gathered empirical evidences on adoption patterns of self-driving vehicles, people's likely use of them, and how that might influence amount of travel, mode choice, auto ownership, and other travel behavior decisions. However, autonomous vehicles are not yet in the market, therefore, there is a need to investigate travelers' behavior in terms of their perception concerns associated with autonomous vehicles and adoption trends. In this research paper, local contexts and opinions were gathered and examined. Questionnaire was designed and distributed to 100 different participants. The study investigates perception concerns and their association with innovation adoption trends. Theory of Diffusion of Innovation has been used for cross-comparison and classification in Trend-Analysis. One-way Analysis of Variance, Post-hoc Multiple Comparison, and Correlation Coefficients using Scatter-dot Plot techniques were deployed to test Hypotheses. The data was collected and analyzed using SPSS v.20. This research concludes that safety is biggest perception concern of travelers, while the adoptiontrend more or less follows the diffusion pattern. However, there is a need to educate people by introducing simulators in the market to reduce Chasm Transition phase, which has been found to be marginally significant in adoption analysis of autonomous vehicles.