Autonomous vehicles and smart cities: future directions of ownership vs shared mobility.

Over the last decade, there has been increasing discussions about self-driving cars and how most auto-makers are racing to launch these products. However, this discourse is not limited to transportation only, but how such vehicles will affect other industries and specific aspects of our daily lives as future users such as the concept of work while being driven and productivity (Pendleton et al., 2017), entertainment (Atzori et al., 2018), travel speed (Kröger et al., 2018) and deliveries (Alessandrini et al., 2015). Although these technologies are beneficial, access to these potentials depends on the behaviour of their users. There is a lack of a conceptual model that elucidate the acceptance of people to Self-driving cars (Nordhoff et al., 2016). Service on-demand and shared mobility are the most critical factors that will ensure the successful adoption of these cars. This paper presents an analysis of people's opinions through a questionnaire about the future of Autonomous vehicles' ownership and the extent to which they accept the idea of vehicle sharing. Besides, this paper presents a logistic regression analysis to test two hypotheses. Firstly, (a) people who usually use Public transportation like (taxi, bus, tram, train, carpooling) are likely to share an Autonomous Vehicle in the future. Secondly, (b) people who use Private cars are expected to own an Autonomous Vehicle in the future. To achieve this aim, a combination of statistical methods has been utilised as well. Unexpectedly, the study findings suggested that AVs ownership will increase contrary to what is expected, that Autonomous vehicles will reduce ownership. Besides, participants have shown low interest in sharing AVs. Therefore, it is likely that ownership of AVs will increase for several reasons as expressed by the participants such as safety, privacy, personal space, suitability to children and availability. This study represents the findings of a survey conducted in Nottingham, UK. Actions must be taken to promote shared mobility to avoid AVs possession growth. The ownership diminution, in turn, will reduce traffic congestion, energy and transport efficiency, better air quality. As a result, analysing the factors that influence the mindset and attitude of people will enable us to understand how to shift from private cars to transport-on-demand which is a priority rather than promoting the technology (Grush & Niles, 2018).