Future sustainability impacts of driverless vehicles are subject to significant uncertainty which arise from complex systemic interactions within the transportation system and parallel social trends influencing transportation. One approach used to holistically address impacts of driverless vehicles is societal scenarios which capture and problematize the complex interactions. However, they are speculative in their nature and sensitive to the pre-conceptions and knowledge of the experts developing the scenarios. In this paper, multiple scenarios developed in several different studies are compared to create a deeper and broader understanding of system impacts of driverless vehicles and the future society with driverless vehicles than what is achieved through individual scenario studies. The findings show that there are four strategic uncertainties shaping the development: the role of the public and private sector, policy making for driverless vehicles, the impact of the sharing economy and the pace of driverless technology development. Most of the studied scenarios report higher traffic volumes than today. Impacts on social equity and the role of public transport vary significantly between the scenarios. Furthermore, the scenario studies expect the sharing economy to be an enabler to curb growth in travel volumes which is important if climate goals for transportation should be possible to meet. Further research efforts should address impacts of driverless vehicles in more systematic forms than societal scenarios but with wider system delimitations than in existing simulation studies.
QC 20201021