# Agentic Vehicles for Human-Centered Mobility: Definition, Prospects, and Synergistic Co-Development with Vehicle Autonomy

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04996 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04996/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [A Survey of Autonomous Driving: Common Practices and Emerging Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05113/) (2019)
- [OpenAGI: When LLM Meets Domain Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04370/) (2023)
- [OpenDriveVLA: Towards End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Large Vision Language Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23463/) (2025)
- [Vision-Language Models can Identify Distracted Driver Behavior from Naturalistic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10159/) (2023)
- [Efficient Mixture-of-Expert for Video-based Driver State and Physiological Multi-task Estimation in Conditional Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21086/) (2024)
- [Automating Traffic Model Enhancement with AI Research Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16876/) (2024)
- [Probabilistic Mission Design for Neuro-Symbolic Unmanned Aircraft Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01439/) (2024)
- [Synthetic Participatory Planning of Shard Automated Electric Mobility Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12317/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [From Prompts to Pavement Through Time: Temporal Grounding in Agentic Scene-to-Plan Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19824/) (2026)
- [When Agents Meet Electric Bus Fleet Operations: Pricing Behavior, Trade-offs, and Policy Implications in an Aggregator Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26400/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autonomy, from the Greek autos (self) and nomos (law), refers to the capacity to operate according to internal rules without external control. Autonomous vehicles (AuVs) are therefore understood as vehicular systems that perceive their environment and execute tasks with minimal human intervention, consistent with the direction indicated by the SAE levels of automated driving. However, recent research and deployments increasingly showcase vehicular capabilities that, while not contradicting autonomy, are not entailed by it, including ambiguous goal handling, purposeful social engagement, external tool use, proactive problem solving, continuous learning, and context-sensitive reasoning in unseen and ethically salient situations, enabled in part by multimodal language models. These developments reveal a gap between technical autonomy and the broader social cognitive functions required for human-centered mobility, which are more precisely captured by the notion of agency. Therefore, rather than adding increasingly elaborate modifiers to "autonomous," we introduce agentic vehicles (AgVs) and suggest that autonomy and agency are intertwined but conceptually distinct: if autonomy concerns what to do and how to do it (task executions under internal rules), agency pertains to why to do it and what else can be done (goal-directed, adaptive actions). We present autonomy and agency as orthogonal yet synergistic dimensions with co-development implications. Vehicle agency marks a novel dimension of mobility service intelligence, heralding vehicles as purposeful actors in society.