This study aims at investigating public perceptions towards the safety and security implications that will arise after the future introduction of flying cars in the traffic fleet. In this context, we focus on individuals’ opinions about possible safety benefits and concerns as well as about policy measures that can potentially enhance the security of flying car. Due to the emergent nature and lack of public exposure of this technology, individuals’ perceptions and opinions regarding flying cars might be subject to several layers of unobserved heterogeneity, such as shared unobserved variations across interrelated perceptions, grouped effects, and interactive effects between various sources of unobserved heterogeneity. To explore individuals’ perceptions accounting, at the same time, for such heterogeneity patterns, grouped random parameters bivariate probit and correlated grouped random parameters binary probit models with heterogeneity in means are estimated. In this context, data collected from an online survey of 584 individuals from the United States are statistically analyzed. The estimation results revealed that a number of individual-specific socio-demographic, behavioral and driving attributes affect the perceptions towards the safety aspects of flying cars, along with the attitudes towards potential security interventions. Despite the exploratory nature of the analysis, the findings of this study can provide manufacturers, policy-makers and regulating agencies with valuable information regarding the integration and acceptance challenges that may arise with the introduction of flying cars.

这项研究旨在调查公众对未来在交通运输机队中引入飞行汽车后将产生的安全和保障影响的看法。在这种情况下，我们集中于个人对可能的安全利益和担忧以及可能提高飞行汽车安全性的政策措施的意见。由于该技术的新兴性质和缺乏公众了解，个人对飞行汽车的看法和观点可能会受到几层不可观察的异质性的影响，例如相互关联的看法之间存在共同的不可观察的变化，成组的影响以及各种来源之间的交互作用观察不到的异质性。同时探讨个人对于这种异质性模式的看法，估计均值异质的分组随机参数双变量概率模型和相关分组随机参数二进制概率模型。在这种情况下，对来自美国的584个人的在线调查收集的数据进行了统计分析。估算结果表明，许多针对个人的社会人口统计学，行为和驾驶属性会影响对飞行汽车安全方面的看法，以及对潜在安全干预措施的态度。尽管分析具有探索性，但本研究的结果仍可为制造商，政策制定者和监管机构提供有关引入飞行汽车可能带来的整合和验收挑战的宝贵信息。