The development of Shared Automated Vehicles (SAVs) is well underway to provide mobility as a
service (MaaS) and bring benefits such as reduced traffic congestion, reduced reliance on privately
owned vehicles and increased independence to non-drivers. To realise the benefits of SAVs,
adoption by private vehicle users is crucial. Previous research has shown this subset of users as
the least likely to adopt SAVs, and it is not well understood what factors are important to achieve
such adoption. The purpose of this study is to obtain an in-depth understanding of attitudes,
perceptions and preferences that influence the acceptance of future SAVs for drivers. This paper
presents the results from an online asynchronous focus group study with 21 British drivers as
participants. From the analysis, Service Quality, Trust and Price Value emerged as the three most
prominent factors to understand user acceptance of SAVs. These three main factors may be of
prime importance for convincing naïve private car owners to accept high-speed SAVs. Productive
use of travel time has been frequently mentioned in previous research as a benefit of vehicle
automation but was scarcely mentioned by participants in this study. Shared Space Quality in
introduced as an indicator for Service Quality, together with Security and Trusting Co-passengers
as two indicators of Trust. Based on the findings, this paper concludes with a conceptual SAV
technology acceptance model is introduced, with the results added as extended model predictors
to the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2).

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