Passenger-Defined Vehicles (PDVs): The Architectural Paradigm of the Post-Driver Era

For more than a century, road-vehicle architecture has been shaped by a persistent requirement: a human must drive. That requirement influenced controls, visibility, seating, cabin orientation, packaging, human-machine interfaces, and the allocation of interior space. Electrification changes propulsion; software-defined vehicle architectures change how functions are created and evolved; driving automation changes who or what performs the dynamic driving task. This paper argues that high driving automation creates a further architectural inflection point: when the human driver is no longer a necessary organizing constraint, passenger requirements can become the primary reference for vehicle architecture. This paper introduces and formalizes Passenger-Defined Vehicle (PDV) as a broad vehicle-architecture and design paradigm for the post-driver era. A PDV is defined here as a vehicle in which passenger needs become primary upstream inputs to the physical architecture, digital systems, and mobility experience, enabled by the reduction or removal of traditional driver-centric constraints. PDV is intentionally not restricted to a particular body style, seating count, compartment configuration, ownership model, or mobility service. Passenger-definedness is proposed as a spectrum rather than a binary label: existing purpose-built autonomous vehicles may already exhibit meaningful passenger-defined characteristics, while future architectures may carry the principle further. PLIYT is discussed as one ground-up implementation intended to explore a high-expression form of PDV architecture for autonomous shared mobility.