Factors affecting trust in the autonomous vehicle: A survey of primary school students and parent perceptions

With the rapid development of autonomous driving technology, autonomous vehicles are expected to perform all driving functions under certain conditions. In fact, some people have even proposed the concept of autonomous school buses. Accordingly, autonomous vehicles exhibit the great potential to become not only the primary alternative to human-driven vehicles during a child's journey to school, but also the vehicles used by today's children as they enter adulthood. However, the acceptance of such vehicles depends on both the children and their parents' trust in this new technology. Hence, this study explores the relationships among perceived usefulness, defects, and risks as well as negative emotions and degree of trust in autonomous vehicles. Based on an online survey of 131 primary school students and 133 parents, the current study concludes that the perceived benefits, perceived risks, and emotional responses influence people's trust in this new technology. Moreover, the results of a regression analysis find two critical factors that influence trust in autonomous vehicles, namely, perceived risk of traffic safety and perceived defects in the vehicle. Additionally, while perceived usefulness is an exclusive predictor of adults' trust, negative emotions only significantly predict the trust of children in the vehicle. For trust in autonomous vehicles, these primary school students share similar perceptions with those of their parents. To our knowledge, the present study is the first to compare people's trust in autonomous vehicles between primary school students and their parents. These findings may inspire the design and promotion of autonomous vehicles for school journeys, thus resulting in increasingly more families trusting and accepting this new technology.