Situation Awareness and System Trust Affecting Handover Processes in Self-Driving Cars up to Level 3 Autonomy

The safety of partially and conditionally automated vehicles is a critical issue, since these are not able to deal with all possibly emerging road scenarios. When a currently developed cutting edge autonomous system faces an unsolvable situation, the driver has to take back manual control. However, if the driver fails to comprehend and manage the situation in time, the consequences can be fatal. This paper provides a review of the literature of situation awareness and system trust regarding autonomous road vehicles, to reveal the psychological aspects of handover situations. Based on the findings, we identified the effect of handover situation on the trust, and identified the critical situation awareness components during handover, which may contribute to safer system design. It is concluded that handover performance can be improved through the purposeful optimization of human-machine interfaces, and it requires large compliance, while reliance should be kept low.