Perceptions of driverless vehicles among social media influencers in China: A case analysis of Apollo Go

As one of the world's largest driverless taxi service providers, the Apollo Go program has attracted significant public attention, and understanding public attitudes toward it is critical for assessing the broader acceptance of driverless vehicles (DVs). However, studies that examine Chinese public perceptions of Apollo Go from the perspective of social media influencers (SMIs) remain scarce. Therefore, this study investigates SMIs perceptions of DVs through the case of Apollo Go, drawing on 41,312 valid Sina Weibo posts collected between August 18, 2021, and September 30, 2024. Based on stakeholder and topic characteristics, SMIs were categorized into seven groups. First, this study analyzed the forwarding network to reveal the information dissemination relationships among SMIs on the Sina Weibo platform. Second, for sentiment analysis, this study proposed a RoBERTa-enhanced TextCNN with BiLSTM-Attention based on Apollo Go model, which incorporates a multi-feature fusion attention mechanism to capture both local patterns and long-range dependencies. Furthermore, the BERTopic algorithm was applied to cluster the positive and negative texts of each SMI group, uncovering multidimensional perceptions of DVs across different stakeholder categories. The study finds that bloggers and media accounts dominate discussions on driverless technology, with centralized dissemination. Negative sentiments dominate, especially among ordinary users. Across groups, common concerns include technological immaturity, safety, commercialization, and employment. These findings highlight the barriers to SMIs' acceptance of driverless taxi services in China and call for greater attention to technical readiness, social trust, employment, and regulatory governance to support sustainable adoption.