Market development of autonomous driving in Germany

This paper presents a model to predict the market penetration of autonomous cars for passenger transportation, focussing on autonomous taxis without a steering wheel. For this, a discrete system dynamics model was created and evaluated where the input parameters have been taken from the literature and a survey. In this survey, user demands were investigated among 873 participants. It showed that gender, age, job situation, city size and monthly income have an impact on the trust in the technology of autonomous driving as well as on the willingness to use autonomous taxis. In contrast, no evidence of an impact was found for the respondent's education or the numbers of adults or children in the household. The results indicate that the majority of autonomous driving vehicles will be private and will have a steering wheel within the scope of this study, which covers the time frame until 2040. These are expected to reach 12.4 million units. At the same time, autonomous taxis will enter the market. These are expected to be mainly non-controllable (without a steering wheel), reaching a maximum of 2.4 million units by 2038. This maximum mainly depends on the trust in the technology as well as on people's willingness to give up their own car due to cost or usage factors. As an autonomous taxi supports more people on average, the total number of vehicles is expected to drop from 45.1 million to around 41.7 million by 2040. Furthermore, the percentage of people travelling primarily by taxis and public transport is expected to increase from today's 20.0% to about 32% in 2040. Then, about 19% will use autonomous taxis at least occasionally. Lastly, the vehicle miles travelled are expected to increase by 25% with people switching from public transport to autonomous taxis.