Connected Driving in German-Speaking Social Media

Abstract

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) have been steadily becoming part of our reality. For their successful integration, studying and understanding public opinions and acceptance is important. Social media platforms offer an extensive opportunity for opinion mining. While there have been studies on people’s attitudes towards automated driving, another important ITS concept—connected driving—has received little to no attention. In the current study, data on how connected driving is represented and perceived were collected from German(-speaking) Reddit and Twitter. In relevant Reddit entries, the necessity of communication between vehicles was discussed almost exclusively in the context of automated driving. On Twitter, mostly shared news and information on the topic are presented, while the number of personal opinions is low. The most concerning subtopic seems to be cybersecurity, which reflects a general trend of data protection issues discussed in society.