Addressing the awareness gap: A combined survey and vehicle registration analysis to assess car owners’ usage of ADAS in fleets

Now Advanced Driver Assistant Systems (ADAS) have entered the consumer market policymakers need instruments to monitor not only the amount of ADAS-equipped cars but also whether car owners actually use these systems; a prerequisite for many ADAS to achieve road safety and/or CO2 reduction benefits. Although questionnaires provide the most common method for large scale fleet assessment, current questionnaires fall short in their ability to assess ADAS usage. Their main pitfall is that ADAS ownership – necessary to compute the gap between ADAS ownership and usage – is based on self-reported rather than actual ADAS ownership. In other words, it is implicitly presumed that car owners are aware of the ADAS with which their car is, or is not, equipped. To our knowledge, the presumption of awareness of ADAS ownership has not been acknowledged as a limitation in current questionnaire-based studies on ADAS usage. Therefore, this paper presents a methodology to address the awareness gap by combining survey and vehicle registration analysis to assess car owners’ usage of ADAS in fleets. In this method, ADAS awareness constitutes of the difference between ADAS presence based on self-report and ADAS presence based on the vehicle specifications of participants’ own car (obtained through participants’ licence plate registration number). To test both the assumption that an awareness gap exists for ADAS as well as the feasibility of the method itself, a survey was performed under 1355 Dutch business drivers. It involved ADAS such as Adaptive Cruise Control, Lane Departure Warning and Emergency Brake. The study showed that many business drivers were unaware of with which ADAS their car is equipped and as a result, they were unable to report they own the ADAS concerned. However, drivers aware of owning a specific system generally reported that they use it. Additionally, the study revealed another group of participants: those who stated owning a specific ADAS while their vehicle specifications contradict this. In conclusion, awareness of ADAS ownership constitutes an important link that is currently missing when concatenating market penetration studies and regular questionnaires on ADAS usage. The proposed method may overcome this shortcoming, increase the validity of surveys on ADAS usage and provide large scale insights in the use of ADAS throughout an entire fleet of vehicles.