Thanks to the progress of emerging technologies such as autonomous driving and vehicle networking, China’s transportation system has been continuously and rapidly developing towards autonomy. Autonomous Transportation System (ATS) will integrate the new concepts of modern transportation on a basis of traditional Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), and is committed to achieving the great transportation concepts of collaborative services, intelligent travel and comprehensive transportation. This paper uses the decomposition model of activity theory to elicit the user needs of ATS from multiple dimensions and constructs a knowledge graph network of ATS user needs to understand and analyze. Combining the content of activity theory and the structure results of the knowledge graph for user needs, the core components of the transportation system and complex interaction among them are studied, which helps to expand the user needs of ATS from two dimensions of technology promotion and policy guidance, thereby promoting the development of ATS.