D7.1 Impact areas and paths

Commission approval ongoing.

The main aim of the PASCAL project is to create the Guide2Autonomy that will improve the understanding of the implications of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV) on society as well as educate their future drivers, passengers and those who will have to share the road with them.

This deliverable D7.1 “Impact areas and paths” identifies the different impact areas and pathways that allows us to assess the impacts in the different areas such as from the perspective of the human individual, wider public acceptance and societal needs, including vulnerable groups. It will lay the basis for an indicator based impact assessment framework to be developed in task 7.2. Gaps are defined for which further research is needed and to which PAsCAL will partly be able to contribute.

The document will allow researchers to adopt a more human centred approach in their research evaluations and provide to policy makers a better understanding of how they can bring the different societal needs into the development and debate on the future of CAV.

Until now, there is little academic research that focusses on the behavioural and associated social and societal impacts of CAVs (less than 6%) of the total research. On the basis of the PAsCAL literature research different human and societal impact areas were identified that can be classified as follow:

• Features of CAV technology and services, including where potential behavioural factors (i.e. motivators and barriers) are at stake;
• Perceptions of individuals (e.g. users, drivers, pilots, cyclists), acceptance of technology and willingness to use CAVs;
• Impact areas related to the specific needs of vulnerable groups (e.g. elderly, impaired, children), including a spatial division between urban and rural areas; and finally
• wider societal impact areas.

The following scheme presents the PAsCAL impact areas and paths identified and how they influence each other (see Annex 1 for details).