An exploratory investigation of public perceptions towards safety and security from the future use of flying cars in the United States

This study aims at investigating public perceptions towards the safety and security implications that will arise after the future introduction of flying cars in the traffic fleet. In this context, we focus on individuals' opinions about possible safety benefits and concerns as well as about policy measures that can potentially enhance the security of flying car. Due to the emergent nature and lack of public exposure of this technology, individuals' perceptions and opinions regarding flying cars might be subject to several layers of unobserved heterogeneity, such as shared unobserved variations across interrelated perceptions, grouped effects, and interactive effects between various sources of unobserved heterogeneity. To explore individuals' perceptions accounting, at the same time, for such heterogeneity patterns, grouped random parameters bivariate probit and correlated grouped random parameters binary probit models with heterogeneity in means are estimated. In this context, data collected from an online survey of 584 individuals from the United States are statistically analyzed. The estimation results revealed that a number of individual-specific socio-demographic, behavioral and driving attributes affect the perceptions towards the safety aspects of flying cars, along with the attitudes towards potential security interventions. Despite the exploratory nature of the analysis, the findings of this study can provide manufacturers, policy-makers and regulating agencies with valuable information regarding the integration and acceptance challenges that may arise with the introduction of flying cars. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.