Connected and Autonomous Vehicles in Society: An Agenda for Social and Policy Research

On May 18-19, 2018, a workshop was held at Michigan State University: “Autonomous Vehicles in Society: Building a Research Agenda.” The workshop produced an agenda for social, economic, and policy research on connected and autonomous vehicles and infrastructure to support that research.

Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) vary widely in their levels of connectivity and autonomy, and they are always part of a larger transportation system which is in turn embedded within broader social, political, and economic contexts. Each CAV system will be deployed in a particular local/ regional context. A deployment can range from pilot tests to fully operational transportation systems. We can think of these deployments as a stream of sociotechnical experiments, each in a unique context constituted by different objectives, technology, geography, economics, ownership, legal institutions, etc. How can we learn and generalize from these CAV deployments?