Do You Want Your Autonomous Car To Drive Like You?
This challenges a key assumption in autonomous vehicle personalization, potentially impacting user acceptance and safety design.
The study tested the assumption that users want autonomous cars to adopt their own driving style, finding that users prefer a more defensive style than their own and often misjudge their actual aggressive driving.
With progress in enabling autonomous cars to drive safely on the road, it is time to start asking how they should be driving. A common answer is that they should be adopting their users' driving style. This makes the assumption that users want their autonomous cars to drive like they drive - aggressive drivers want aggressive cars, defensive drivers want defensive cars. In this paper, we put that assumption to the test. We find that users tend to prefer a significantly more defensive driving style than their own. Interestingly, they prefer the style they think is their own, even though their actual driving style tends to be more aggressive. We also find that preferences do depend on the specific driving scenario, opening the door for new ways of learning driving style preference.