Description:

Northwestern University Transportation Center presents:

"Understanding the adoption of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV) and the role of peer influence"

CARA WANG
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)

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ABSTRACT:

Despite of all the promising benefits, adoption of CAV is expected to be a decades-long transition process. While innovators and early adopters tend to embrace the disruptive technology relatively quickly, the majority will adopt CAV after varying periods of time. The prevailing adoption rate often plays a key role in these late adopters’ decisions. Meanwhile, today’s social networking technologies have strengthened peer influence and caused noticeable changes to people’s decision-making behavior. Impressionable individuals are more likely to follow their peers, which may either accelerate or slow down their adoption process. A thorough understanding of this complicated CAV adoption process is important as it sets the grounds for infrastructure design, traffic operation and community planning. This research explores how CAV adoption is impacted by various factors, especially the peer influence perceived by people with different level of impressibility. A stated preference survey on CAV adoption, including peer influence related questions was carried out in five cities in China. 1243 recent car buyers were surveyed, yielding 4251 valid records of stated vehicle preference in different scenarios. An Integrated Choice and Latent Variable Model was used to identify the level of impressionability for each respondent, as well as its implication on the influence of CAV’s current adoption rate. Besides some enlightening findings about the effects of sociodemographic features, the modeling results confirm that current CAV adoption rate has a significant impact on individual CAV adoption decision, but to a varying degree which further depends on this individual’s level of impressionability. Younger individuals, people with higher education level, higher income, and those with more driving experiences are more readily to be influenced by their peers. Several scenarios of CAV adoption are then simulated to offer more insights into this intriguing process.

SPEAKER BIO:

Dr. Cara Wang got her B.S and M. S. degrees from Tsinghua University, China, and Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research mainly focuses on the analysis of the interactions between land use, transport (both passenger and freight), energy and environment, and the spatial dependence of travel behavior. She has published over 60 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. She is a recipient of the Pikarsky Award for Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation, and INFORMS Franz Edelman Award. Dr. Wang is member of TRB Committee ABJ70 (Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Computing Applications) and AT015 (Freight Transportation Planning and Logistics). Dr. Wang has been PI and Co-PI of research projects sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF), National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP), National Cooperative Freight Research Program (NCFRP), New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), U.S. State Department of Transportation, among others.

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