Automated transport and society. Identifying drawbacks, exploring possibilities

Automated Vehicles (AV) are those which are able to steer, break, accelerate, maintain speed, and perform a number of other operations without direct human interference. In the future, their level of automation is expected to move from simple driving to full automation. Recent research on AV tends to focus on how to make them a commercially viable technological reality and on their advantages. In this research, the merits of AV are presented in a very optimistic way while the drawbacks are either supressed or framed as ‘implementation barriers’. Furthermore the existing body of research look at AVs from a strictly legal and engineering perspective, therefore not taking into consideration the full range of potential outcomes of AV using a transdisciplinary approach. The additional contribution of this paper would be to enrich the existing body of research providing appropriate attention to the societal impacts of AVs adoption, using a holistic and transdisciplinary approach, and focusing in particular on the AVs impacts on the equity of distribution of benefits and costs to the different social groups. In more details this paper aims at providing (1) a contribution to fill this problematic research gap, through a critical multi-disciplinary analysis of the societal impacts of implementing AVs; (2) possible solutions to help solving these problems, when solutions can be envisioned. A mixed methodology approach is used. First, a web-based survey has been conducted among different stakeholders and second, a number of semi-structured expert interviews has been directed with leading figures from different areas of expertise.