Autonomous driving technologies are advancing rapidly, and determining when consumers ride in driverless vehicles on a daily basis is becoming essential. Using choice experiments, first, we elicit consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for autonomous driving systems in Japan along with their WTP for hybrid and electric engines. We found in this study that the Japanese consumers’ WTP is, on average, lower than the estimates for the US market and is not sufficient to enable autonomous vehicles (AVs) to capture a meaningful share of the existing car market. Second, compared with a previous study in the US, we propose and discuss an expected social dilemma caused by the ethical problems that AVs will face, known as the Trolley Problems. We find that social dilemma may occur because people tend not want to buy “moral” AVs. Third, we explored the determinants of the WTP and social dilemma to find that the credibility of AVs is determined to be a critical factor for the social dilemma.

自动驾驶技术正在迅速发展，确定消费者每天何时乘坐无人驾驶车辆变得至关重要。首先，通过选择实验，我们激发了消费者购买日本自动驾驶系统的意愿（WTP）以及混合动力和电动发动机的意愿。我们在这项研究中发现，日本消费者的WTP平均而言低于美国市场的估计值，并且不足以使自动驾驶汽车（AV）占领现有汽车市场的重要份额。其次，与美国以前的研究相比，我们提出并讨论了由视听人员将面临的道德问题（称为手推车问题）引起的预期社会困境。我们发现，由于人们倾向于不购买“道德的”视听设备，因此可能会出现社会困境。第三，