The advent of autonomous vehicles will soon become a reality that will transform Transportation in a substantial way, while at the same time raising the question of people’s acceptance of these technologies. There have been several international studies examining this very issue, but none conducted in Greece. The purpose of this Diploma Thesis is to fill in this void by surveying Greek drivers on their acceptance and willingness to buy an autonomous vehicle, as well as their opinion on self-driving technology in general. For this purpose, a stated-preference approach was used that included hypothetical scenarios of cost, time, and safety, which were distributed in a carefully developed questionnaire. By using models of logistic regression and the respective utility functions it was possible to extract a mathematical description of the drivers’ attitude towards autonomous vehicles. Results show that this attitude is dependent on the cost, time, and level of safety of said vehicles, the existence of driving support systems (GPS, parking assistant) in cars today, their opinion on the traffic of autonomous Public Transport and taxis on the roads, their driving experience, age, and family income. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting