Qualitative research on high school seniors' attitudes towards fully autonomous personal vehicles

This bachelor thesis explores research on attitudes of high school seniors towards fully autonomous personal vehicles. Its main objective was to find out how autonomous vehicles are perceived, which concerns are related to them and for what reasons they arise. Autonomous vehicles were defined in this thesis as vehicles that are able to replace a driver for at least a part of journey. Research in this area is important because of the ever-increasing level of vehicle autonomy, which is controversially accepted by people. Qualitative research was chosen to meet the aim of this thesis. The research was based on guided semi-structured interviews with ten high school seniors from Prague. The interviews were evaluated by thematic analysis using the MAXQDA expert program. A total of 530 codes were generated and divided into three themes including personal experience, impression of the technology, and perceived benefits and concerns. Based on traditional literature search, the four research questions were determined. The first question deals with the influence of current habits on the relationship with autonomous vehicles. According to the participants, current habits do not have any influence. However, it is believed that the perception of autonomous vehicles is influenced by the environment in which the participants usually occur and with which they compare their expectations of autonomous vehicles. The second question addresses the attitude towards driving and its influence on the perceptions of autonomy in transport. The research shows that a positive attitude towards driving leads to a stronger tendency to reject autonomous vehicles. The third question focuses on perceptions of privacy, data security and the possibility of a hacker attack. Participants were aware of privacy issues but mostly did not think of data security and the possibility of vehicle hacking. One of the main results of the thesis is the finding that although the issue of privacy is often mentioned, it does not fundamentally affect the participants' perception of autonomous vehicles. The fourth question focuses on the concerns of interviewees and the ability of car companies to mitigate these issues through their communications. Unpredictable situations were found to be a major concern, stemming from a lack of confidence in higher level of automation. An interesting contribution of this thesis was the participants' opinion that the automotive industry cannot alleviate their fears through communication; therefore, they need personal or mediated experience to trust autonomous vehicles.