To own or to access? The impact of vehicle access models on autonomous vehicle acceptance

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) and service-based vehicle access models, such as subscriptions and car sharing, are expected to reshape future mobility. These access models allow consumers to experience new vehicle technologies without committing to ownership and can operate within or alongside broader Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) ecosystems. Whether higher levels of driving automation make service-based access more attractive or instead reinforce preferences for privately owned vehicles remains an open question. To explore this question, a discrete choice experiment was conducted with 1020 Korean consumers, and a mixed logit model was employed to estimate how AV-related attributes affect consumer choices and to predict conditional choice patterns under four technology and policy scenarios. The utility effect of higher automation varies across access models; in particular, higher automation increases the relative attractiveness of ownership but decreases that of subscriptions. Infrastructure accessibility also affects utility more than charging time within the attribute ranges examined. In the scenarios, subscriptions and car sharing serve as lower-commitment access channels during the earlier stages of automation, but their longer-term role depends on preference evolution, vehicle costs, infrastructure development, and service-based pricing incentives. Technological progress alone does not ensure a shift toward shared or service-based AV use.