Effects of interface customisation on drivers’ takeover experience in highly automated driving

Highly automated driving (HAD) allows drivers to engage in non-driving-related tasks without requiring a constant monitoring under limited circumstances. It can be beneficial for the drivers, but on the other hand, challenging because they need to take control back whenever requested by the system. This situation requires drivers to gain situation awareness rapidly after out-of-the-loop experience. This process could have an impact on drivers’ subjective experience to a varying degree due to their various mental and physical capabilities. Given this, an assumption is made that enabling drivers to customise the human–machine interface (HMI) could lead to an improvement in subjective assessment of takeover experience. Therefore, this study investigates the effect of the customised HMI on drivers’ experience during takeovers after engaging in a non-driving-related task in a simulated, HAD environment. Their subjective experience was explored through perceived workload, usability, acceptance, and trust. The results showed that the drivers’ subjective experience was significantly improved which was measured after conducting takeovers in the environment with customised HMI. This could represent that offering an opportunity to drivers to customise the HMI in the way that they could receive and process information, and in turn, facilitate consequent decision-making, could help create a positive takeover experience.