Dual-Path Associations Between System Operation Quality and Autonomous Taxi Use Intention in a Cross-Sectional Survey

This cross-sectional study examines how system operation quality is associated with intention to use autonomous taxis through personal cognitive and social information pathways. Residents of Wuhan, Suzhou, and Shanghai who had heard of or been exposed to autonomous taxi services completed an anonymous 5-point Likert questionnaire. System transparency, system safety, and service quality were modeled as operation-quality dimensions; perceived risk and online word-of-mouth (OWOM) information evaluation were tested as parallel statistical mediators, with trust and conformity tendency as moderators. Of 850 submitted questionnaires, 18 failed the attention check, 9 failed the lie-detection item, and 20 met the prespecified absolute standardized Z-score screening criterion of 3, leaving 803 cases in the primary analytic sample. Confirmatory factor analysis showed acceptable reliability and validity, and the structural model showed good fit (χ²/df = 1.093, RMSEA = 0.011, CFI = 0.997). All three operation-quality dimensions were associated with lower perceived risk, more favorable OWOM information evaluation, and greater intention to use. All six indirect associations were supported by bootstrap confidence intervals. Trust weakened the negative association between perceived risk and intention to use, whereas conformity tendency strengthened the positive association between OWOM information evaluation and intention to use. Because the study used a non-probability cross-sectional sample, the findings are interpreted as associations and should not be generalized beyond comparable populations without further validation.