Ethical issues concerning automated vehicles and their implications for transport

The introduction of automated vehicles (AV) in the market progresses before the stakeholders fully 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 a key issue. One of the main aspects of public acceptance is the ethical concerns raised by AV. In the current chapter, we will mainly review the research on the ethical issues related to ethics-by-design of AV through its moral agency, application of different ethical theories to the decision making in critical situations, and whether ethics setting should be mandatory or personal. Our review shows that while there are several ethical frameworks proposed for AV, research on public acceptance mostly contrasts utilitarian and deontological ethics. Algorithmic implementation of the proposed frameworks, however, is yet to be done. In the second part, we will address several ethical issues relevant for the implementation of AV in transport system and policy decision making.