SETTING THE STAGE FOR SELF-DRIVING CARS: Exploration of future autonomous driving experiences

Paper in proceeding, 2014

Self-driving cars are under development and are predicted to reach the market within a few years. There is a need to understand how users will respond to the technology, and what possible benefits or difficulties they perceive. User involvement is a prerequisite for eliciting this information at the same time as several studies have demonstrated the problems associated with investigating “the future”. In this paper, two different approaches for exploring future automotive technology were applied in two studies of users’ future experiences with self-driving cars. Both studies used materials to mediate a shift in focus from today to tomorrow, but the outcomes varied with the different approaches. The results of the two studies provide insights into users’ expectations of autonomous cars and contribute to our knowledge on how different studies on the same topic can elicit different types of data.