The literature on autonomous vehicle (AV) acceptance highlights the significance of hedonic motivation in AV adoption. Numerous studies empirically confirm hedonic motivation as either the most or one of the most influential factors in the acceptance of AV. This fact calls for a need to achieve a wider understanding of the potential AV users’ perceived enjoyment (i.e., hedonic motivation). To this end, this study investigates the antecedents of hedonic motivation in the AV technology acceptance domain. The partial least square structural equations modeling approach was applied to analyze the data collected from 1823 respondents from 11 countries via an online survey. The developed hypotheses are examined for the entire sample, as well as separately for the Global North (GN) countries' sample, Global South (GS) countries' sample, and each individual country through a cross-country analysis. The results for the entire sample indicate that social influence is the strongest predictor of hedonic motivation, consistent with the findings of the GN sample. However, in the GS sample, self-efficacy emerges as the strongest predictor of hedonic motivation. Perceived safety is the second strongest predictor of hedonic motivation for both the GN and GS samples, highlighting its importance in relation to the perceived enjoyment of PAV. Trust does not significantly contribute to hedonic motivation, while the enjoyment of driving conventional cars has a small negative impact on hedonic motivation in the GS sample. The cross-country analysis reveals general patterns in the findings of the GN and GS samples, while highlighting a few exceptions. The results of the multi-group moderation analysis highlight the significant impact of the respondents' geographical distribution (GN vs GS) on their perceived enjoyment of PAV. Additionally, the analysis indicates that female respondents who enjoy driving conventional cars are less likely to perceive PAV as enjoyable compared to male participants who enjoy driving conventional cars.