Driving safe in the future? Driver Needs and Requirements for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

Licentiate thesis, 2007

In recent years, active safety has become an increasingly important factor within the automotive industry. Active safety systems, also known as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), have the function of actively assisting the driver in avoiding accidents by providing information about current and upcoming traffic situations and helping the driver take proper action before a potential accident occurs. In order to reach the intended safety benefits of these systems it is essential that drivers understand them in order to have safe interaction with them and the surrounding traffic environment. This thesis is a user-centred approach to investigate drivers’ needs, requirements and attitudes towards ADAS during normal driving and pre-cautionary conditions. Paper I was a literature review, describing the basic ideas, functions, and possible human factors issues concerning both current ADAS and future concepts. In Paper II, a set of three focus group discussions were conducted with Swedish, US American, and Chinese participants in order to study differences and similarities in attitude towards three different ADAS. Paper III described the process of defining user requirements for ADAS using the method Personas, as a starting point in the design process. Based on the Personas, different scenarios and narratives were created and used in a workshop to specify user needs and requirements in the interface design for ADAS. Paper IV focused on discerning traffic scenarios in which a driver could use assistance from an ADAS during normal driving in order to avoid getting involved in critical incidents or accidents. Results from the four papers show that although the purpose of ADAS is to generate a positive effect on traffic safety by supporting the driver in the driving task much work needs to be done in order to meet these expectations. Preliminary evidence showed that there were differences in attitude towards ADAS between countries. It was also concluded that these differences largely seemed to depend on infrastructural factors. Results also show differences in driver behaviour between China and Scandinavia and how these differences need to be taken into consideration before introducing new systems on different markets.