Academics are convening an industry workshop this week in Gothenburg, Sweden, to address a market risk few autonomous vehicle makers publicly acknowledge: antisocial behavior inside self-driving cars.
Pavlo Bazilinskyy, an assistant professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, has spent over a decade studying AI-driven human-robot interactions. His research identified a concrete concern: a search for "public transport" on adult content sites returned 297 results, suggesting demand for semi-private spaces where misconduct could occur.
Bazilinskyy and co-organizer Alexandros Rouchitsas, an engineering psychologist, assembled a four-hour workshop with researchers from systems engineering, computer science, psychology, and tourism studies. The goal is to design norms and technical safeguards before autonomous mobility becomes mainstream.
The business logic is straightforward. Public trust determines adoption velocity. A single high-profile incident—misuse of a self-driving vehicle as a mobile space for prohibited conduct—could trigger regulatory backlash and consumer hesitation that delays the market's $7 trillion prize.
"We want automated mobility solutions accepted and trusted by the general public," Rouchitsas said. He noted the technology's potential for elderly passengers, children, and people with disabilities who lack independent mobility—use cases that depend entirely on safe, predictable vehicle environments.
The researchers are stress-testing a future in which autonomous vehicles function as quasi-public spaces—not regulated like transit but shared like taxis. Preventing misuse requires both technical controls and social norms embedded early, before the market normalizes a particular use pattern.
