The politics and imaginary of 'autonomous vehicles': a participatory journey

The study investigates alternative mobility futures articulated by citizens and stakeholders across Europe, focusing on how these imaginaries challenge dominant technocratic narratives surrounding Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs). The research is situated within EU policy debates, particularly the European Commission’s 2018 communication on automated mobility. It seeks to deconstruct the social and political purposes ascribed to CAVs and to explore whether citizens consider the technology’s promises plausible and desirable. The introduction frames the work within post-normal science (PNS) and anticipatory governance, emphasizing the need for extended peer communities and participatory approaches to produce policy-relevant knowledge on complex, uncertain, and value-laden technological issues. The core research purpose is to surface participants’ values, expectations, and visions to redefine mobility problems in their own terms and to explore alternative futures beyond a singular automated mobility trajectory.

The paper draws on Science and Technology Studies (STS), post-normal science (Funtowicz & Ravetz), anticipatory governance, and digital/design anthropology to interrogate how technological promises are constructed and how citizens’ lived, embodied, and affective experiences are often sidelined in technology discourses. It critiques ‘user acceptance’ framings that reduce public concerns to trust or risk aversion, arguing instead for examining governance, ethics, and power in shaping technology trajectories. The authors mobilize the social construction of technology perspective (Bijker, Hughes, Pinch) to argue that technological systems never become truly autonomous but gain momentum through socio-organizational commitments. Prior work problematizing the human-car assemblage (e.g., Dant; Brown & Laurier) highlights driving as a social activity, implying that AVs must interpret and emit social cues in complex environments. Literature also notes opacity in digital technology design, the politics of infrastructures and standards, and industry’s goal of ‘socially acceptable’ autonomous driving. This framing underpins the paper’s focus on how CAVs both shape and are shaped by social, ethical, and political relations, calling for participatory scrutiny of their implications for cities, mobility, safety, sustainability, privacy, and governance.

The pilot employed a mixed qualitative design combining: (1) narrative analysis of core texts (books, journal and news articles) to map the discourse on CAVs and identify technological/social promises and ethical issues; (2) nine semi-structured stakeholder interviews across the EU (Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, UK, Italy) spanning ITS, electronics engineering, road infrastructure, safety, and R&I; and (3) eight Futures Making Ateliers (FMA) with 148 participants held in local languages across Italy, Portugal, and Belgium (participants from Greece, Italy, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and the UK). Narrative analysis identified promises and issues which informed engagement materials. Interview transcripts were coded with categories: Technological Promises and Challenges; User Acceptance and Experience; Governance; Connectivity and Autonomy; Energy and Sustainability. The FMAs, influenced by material deliberation, used object-based methods (demonstrations, custom image-only ‘CAV Cards’, Lego prototyping) to elicit embodied and affective knowledge. Three atelier activities: (a) ‘Narratives of Mobility’—participants evaluated plausibility and desirability of statements from the EC 2018 communication; (b) ‘Vehicles of the Future’—Lego prototyping addressing what problems their vehicles solve and for whom; (c) ‘Imagining a Neighbourhood’—group co-creation of future mobility neighborhoods, considering safety, sustainability, data/privacy, user agency, implementation, and urban infrastructure. FMA transcripts were coded for: Technological Promises and Challenges; User Experience; Social and Ethical Issues; Governance; Connectivity and Autonomy; Energy and Sustainability, and tracked mentions of vehicle types, energy sources, and ownership models. Engagement emphasized exploration of matters of concern over opinion polling, with no claim of representativeness.

• Scale and participants: 8 FMAs; 148 citizen participants; 9 expert interviews across multiple EU countries and sectors.
• Stakeholder interview insights: Industry narratives overpromise on timelines and scope. Interviewees questioned rapid fleet penetration due to slow vehicle turnover and inability to retrofit legacy fleets; raised misaligned incentives favoring private car ownership; noted city officials’ skepticism about CAV value; and expressed uncertainty about environmental benefits (e.g., potential for induced travel). One interviewee cited truck platooning fuel consumption reductions of about 15–16% per truck, while cautioning potential traffic increases.
• Policy discourse critique: The EC’s 2018 communication echoes industry promises (cost reductions, time savings, car sharing, safety, accessibility, sustainability, and ‘Vision Zero’), presuming driverless mobility as a central future. The study finds these promises depend on multiple uncertain technological and social preconditions and are framed as technological solutions to broad societal issues.
• Citizen perspectives from FMAs: • Plausibility/desirability of removing the ‘human factor’ was questioned; participants highlighted the social nature of driving and concerns about agency in fully automated systems. • Safety: Skepticism that automation alone would reduce fatalities; concerns about new accident modalities, liability (who is to blame—programmers, operators, regulators), mixed traffic, inattention of users, and hacking/cybersecurity risks. • Agency: Preference for systems that augment rather than replace users (“autonomous but not automatic”); desire to retain decision-making capacity. • Privacy and data governance: Strong concerns about digital rights, surveillance, data security, and systemic vulnerability to cyberattacks. • Acceptance reframed: Distrust was often directed at institutions, engineers, and governance rather than at ‘technology’ per se.
• Alternative futures: Participants emphasized multimodal, versatile, modular, and shared mobility concepts, often shifting from private car-centric options toward public/shared systems when planning neighborhoods. They proposed redesigning urban space (e.g., denser services, vertical forests), limiting car presence (externalizing parking, even eliminating cars), and in some cases reducing the need for movement (e.g., remote work). Automation was most often discussed in relation to shared/public modes (buses, taxis, metros), including dynamic ‘swarm’-like services without fixed routes.
• Energy and sustainability: Participants discussed ethically sourced, sustainable energy. Fuels explicitly mentioned included Gasoline (5), Diesel (5), Ethanol (2), along with electricity (most cited), human power, magnets, and plant energy. This aligns with trends of declining demand for coal (~8%), oil (~5%), and gas (~2%) in 2020, with renewables growing due to capacity and dispatch priorities (IEA 2020).
• Overarching result: For many participants, CAVs functioned as a MacGuffin—a prompt to articulate broader mobility concerns and to co-create diverse futures that prioritize governance, equity, sustainability, and urban design over a singular technological solution.

The findings indicate a significant mismatch between dominant CAV narratives and citizens’ articulated mobility problems and priorities. By engaging citizens through material deliberation and speculative futuring, the study reveals that the promise of CAVs as a comprehensive solution is both contingently plausible and often undesirable without substantial changes in governance, infrastructure, incentives, and social contracts. Participants’ concerns (safety, privacy, agency, equity, environmental impacts) underscore that technological promises depend on broader socio-technical systems and policy frameworks. The emphasis on reconfiguring urban space, enhancing public/shared modes, and sometimes reducing mobility needs challenges solutionist assumptions and reorients attention to governance interventions (e.g., incentives, regulation, urban planning, data rights) as central levers. Thus, the research question—how citizens imagine mobility futures and assess CAV promises—is addressed by showing that citizens favor diverse, context-sensitive futures where automation, if present, complements public/shared mobility and respects agency and rights. The MacGuffin framing demonstrates how focusing on CAVs opens debate on wider mobility futures, facilitating anticipatory governance and extended peer community input essential for fit-for-purpose policy.

Through narrative analysis, expert interviews, and participatory FMAs, the study surfaces citizens’ imaginaries that frequently contest industry and policy promises about CAVs. Participants envision mobility futures that emphasize active transport, public/shared modes, urban redesign, sustainability, data rights, and user agency—often deprioritizing private car use and, at times, mobility itself. The work shows persistent technological, social, and ethical challenges to CAV deployment and argues for upstream citizen engagement to inform policy, moving beyond technological solutionism toward governance-centric approaches. The study suggests that current policy framings may target a different problem than citizens’ mobility concerns and calls for institutionalizing participatory methods (e.g., via the EC’s CC-DEMOS) to routinely integrate extended peer communities into policymaking. Future research should deepen engagement across diverse geographies and demographics, examine governance mechanisms for aligning incentives and rights, and explore systemic interactions between automation, urban planning, energy systems, and social equity.

• Representativeness: The citizen engagement was not designed to be statistically representative; findings reflect depth of understanding rather than generalizability.
• Scope and sample: Limited number of interviews (n=9) and ateliers (8; 148 participants) constrain breadth across EU contexts.
• Temporal context: Research preceded the COVID-19 pandemic, which has since altered transport behaviors and mobility needs, potentially affecting applicability.
• Data availability: Interview and atelier data cannot be shared due to informed consent stipulations; transcripts/audio were destroyed post-research.
• Policy linkage: The social lab was not embedded in the official EC communication development process, limiting direct policy co-creation.
• Visualization quantification: Some counts (e.g., mobility type utterances) derive from qualitative coding and visual summaries rather than precise population-level metrics.