Audi publishes user typology and emotional landscape of autonomous driving

From the suspicious driver to the tech-savvy passenger: in the representative online study “The Pulse of Autonomous Driving”, Audi has produced a user typology of autonomous driving. In the context of the initiative “&Audi”, the mobility company Audi in cooperation with the market research institute Ipsos interviewed 21,000 people in nine countries on three continents. It shows that young, high-earning and well-educated “status-oriented trendsetters” and “tech-savvy passengers” most look forward to autonomous driving. Amongst “suspicious drivers”, who tend to be older with a lower level of income and education, skepticism is dominant. The “safety-oriented reluctant” would use autonomous driving only when others have gained experience with the technology. The largest user group are the “open-minded co-pilots”, who are fundamentally open to autonomous driving as long as they can take control at any time. The human readiness index (HRI) provides insights into the way that attitudes to autonomous driving relate to sociodemographics. It combines knowledge of, interest in, emotions about and readiness to use self-driving cars to produce a numerical indicator between -10 and +10.