Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITSs) are an important development for society. C-ITSs enhance road safety, improve traffic efficiency, and promote sustainable transportation through interconnected and intelligent communication between vehicles, infrastructure, and traffic-management systems. Many real-world implementations still consider traditional Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) as the underlying trust model and security control. However, there are challenges with the PKI-based security control from a scalability and revocation perspective. Lately, certificateless cryptography has gained research attention, also in conjunction with C-ITSs, making it a new type of security control to be considered. In this study, we use certificateless cryptography as a candidate to investigate factors affecting decisions (not) to adopt new types of security controls, and study its current gaps, key challenges and possible enablers which can influence the industry. We provide a qualitative study with industry specialists in C-ITSs, combined with a literature analysis of the current state of research in certificateless cryptographic in C-ITS. It was found that only 53% of the current certificateless cryptography literature for C-ITSs in 2022–2023 provide laboratory testing of the protocols, and 0% have testing in real-world settings. However, the trend of research output in the field has been increasing linearly since 2016 with more than eight times as many articles in 2022 compared to 2016. Based on our analysis, using a five-phased Innovation-Decision Model, we found that key reasons affecting adoption are: availability of proof-of-concepts, knowledge beyond current best practices, and a strong buy-in from both stakeholders and standardization bodies. © 2023 by the authors.