The technological advancement of autonomous vehicles has accelerated in recent days:
the number of street tests conducted in the daily traffic of cities is increasing
dynamically, and so are the numbers of cities involved, participating developers,
and tested vehicles. It can also be observed that not only self-driving cars are being
tested on the street now; self-driving buses and trucks are also appearing on public
roads, and on the pavements a lesser-known type of vehicle can be found, the so-called
autonomous city delivery robots. There are several international studies on the social
acceptance of self-driving vehicles, but the vast majority of them focus on self-driving
cars. We have little information about how the urban population relates to autonomous
delivery robots, which travel on the pavement and can come into much more direct contact
with residents than their counterparts that travel on the road or in the air. Our
study, by means of netnography and questionnaire research, as well as motion picture
sentiment research, analyses Hungarian society's attitude towards self-driving transport
vehicles.
