Autonomous Vehicles Adoption as a Facilitator of Driving and Usage Patterns’ Change

Autonomous vehicles (AV) will shift from a mere means of transport towards becoming a diverse environment where different activities could be carried out. This would lead to a change in driving and usage patterns. Since these patterns are a novel field that is scarcely covered in the current literature, the purpose of this paper is to explore the changes in a generation of millennials, as their interaction with smart technologies is incomparable to any previous generation, suggesting them as early AV adopters. The paper focuses on the perceptions of millennials regarding in-vehicle time usage and situations when AV could be sent somewhere to conduct something instead of an individual. The data is collected with a survey questionnaire and analyzed with descriptive statistics. Furthermore, millennials are divided into groups according to technology enthusiasm, and t-test is performed to observe the differences between technologically more and technologically less enthusiastic individuals. Millennials are shown to have a more positive perceptions of activities that could already be carried out in conventional vehicles, while opinions on those specific to AV are more neutral. In addition, no significant differences are observed between technologically more and technologically less enthusiastic individuals were observed, indicating that technology enthusiasm has little effect on AV-specific activities. This could be due to the fact that individuals still have vague perceptions of them; however, additional research would be needed for a deeper understanding.