Ethical issues concerning automated vehicles and their implications for transport

Résumé En

The introduction of automated vehicles (AV) in the market progresses before the stakeholdersfully understand the capacity and the limitations of this complex technology.While this can be considered as a usual course of deployment of a new technology,future large-scale expansion of AV at the societal level makes public acceptance akey issue. One of the main aspects of public acceptance is the ethical concerns raisedby AV. In the current chapter, we will mainly review the research on the ethical issuesrelated to ethics-by-design of AV through its moral agency, application of different ethicaltheories to the decision making in critical situations, and whether ethics settingshould be mandatory or personal. Our review shows that while there are several ethicalframeworks proposed for AV, research on public acceptance mostly contrasts utilitarianand deontological ethics. Algorithmic implementation of the proposed frameworks,however, is yet to be done. In the second part, we will address several ethical issuesrelevant for the implementation of AV in transport system and policy decision making.