This study investigates the effect of peripheral visual and haptic information in providing information about upcoming motions of a fully automated vehicle to an occupant engaging in a non-driving related task, i.e. reading. Two peripheral displays, one visual and the other haptic, were designed and tested. It was hypothesized that the peripheral information would enhance the users’ situation awareness and reduce their mental workload. The study was conducted with 18 participants driven around in a real-road environment in a multi-purpose vehicle that simulated a fully automated vehicle. The peripheral visual and haptic information significantly enhanced situation awareness but did not reduce the mental workload. Implications and future work are discussed.

This paper presents a new experimental approach to simulate projected autonomous driving styles based on the accelerations at three road profiles. This study was focused on the determination of ranges of accelerations in triaxial direction to simulate the autonomous driving experience. A special device, known as the Automatic Acceleration and Data controller (AUTOAccD), has been developed to guide the designated driver to accomplish the selected accelerations based on the road profiles and the intended driving styles namely assertive, defensive and light rail transit (LRT). Experimental investigations have been carried out at three different road profiles (junction, speed hump, and corner) with two designated drivers with five trials on each condition. A driving style with the accelerations of LRT has also been included in this study as it is significant to the present methodology because the autonomous car is predicted to accelerate like an LRT, in such a way that it enables the users to conduct activities such as working on a laptop, using personal devices or eating and drinking while travelling. The results demonstrated that 92 out of 110 trials of the intended accelerations for autonomous driving styles could be achieved and simulated on the real road by the designated drivers. The differences between the two designated drivers were negligible, and the rates of succeeding in realizing the intended accelerations were high. The present approach in simulating autonomous driving styles focusing on accelerations can be used as a tool for experimental setup involving autonomous driving experience and acceptance.

A study was conducted to investigate the driving styles within the geographical region of Malaysia. The first part of the study determined Malaysian drivers’ driving styles using the Multidimensional Driving Style Inventory approach. Respondents had various backgrounds in terms of age, gender and experience of driving. A statistical factor analysis was done for 338 respondents revealing four driving styles; careful, risky, anxious-dissociative and angry. In addition, a comparison with previous findings from Netherlands and Israel was also done in this study. The next part of the study focused on the associations of these driving styles with two personality traits (sensation seeking and desire for control), sociodemographic factors and experience of driving. The last part of the paper discusses the relevance of the study against the background of future automotive development.

This paper presents the development of the Mobility Lab, an instrumented car that was developed to support research on the comfort of automated driving. The Mobility Lab was established as a platform to investigate the implications of motion sickness on human users especially when exposed to low-frequency horizontal forces while engaging in non-driving activities. First, the Mobility Lab’s overview of interior setup and system architecture involving data acquisition system with its sensors is described. Then, a validation study is presented, comprising of simulations with forty-six participants by two designated drivers. The simulations were focusing on the manipulation of lateral acceleration based on defensive automated driving style settings. The consistency of the manipulations in terms of accelerations, velocities, frequencies and motion sickness dose values by both drivers was measured and compared. Subjective motion sickness assessments, as well as user rating towards the believability of the Mobility Lab platform, were also carried out. The results indicate good reliability in producing consistent simulations of automated driving experience within the desired settings. In addition, the versatility of Mobility Lab in term of flexibility on interior setup arrangement and also its measurement system makes various automated driving related experiments possible.

This study investigates the level of experienced motion sickness when performing reading while being driven in fully automated driving under three different conditions. One condition was without any intervention while the other two conditions were with the visual (VPIS) and haptic (HPIS) peripheral information system. Both systems provided the upcoming navigational information in the lateral direction three seconds before the turning/cornering was done. It was hypothesized that with the peripheral information systems, the experienced motion sickness would be reduced compared to the condition where a peripheral information system was not present. Eighteen participants with severe motion sickness susceptibility were carefully chosen to undergo the conditions using an instrumented vehicle with the Wizard-of-Oz approach. The participants were required to read from a tablet during the whole 15-minutes of automated driving. Results from the heart rate variability (beats per minute, root means square of successive differences, and high-frequency component) indicated no statistically significant changes (p < 0.05) in motion sickness found with the presence of HPIS and VPIS when performing reading when being driven in automated mode. However, results from this study were mixed and inconclusive, but overall findings indicated mild motion sickness was found in both VPIS and HPIS conditions.