Automotive societal factors

Automotive Societal Factors addresses the relation between a car or other vehicle, its human driver, and its dynamic environment. We are especially concerned with technological, social, and legal perspectives of autonomous driving. Autonomous vehicles have a direct impact on our society. In addition to technological challenges, numerous critical questions related to the context of autonomous driving arise: What are the prospects concerning data security? How shall we deal with wide-ranging interventions in our own mobile autonomy? What problems result when an autonomous vehicle crosses national borders? In what form will insurance companies assume liability for autonomous vehicles involved in accidents in the future? Or, vice versa: Can we even continue to leave humans at the wheel at all, and may driving robots prove to increase road safety? Apart from the lectures students will work in groups on an assignment that incorporates many of the topics of the course: societal dimensions of autonomous driving, future mobility and traffic, user perception, legal issues, and ethics.

After this course, students are able to:

• Apply human-centered design methods and evaluation metrics within an automotive context
• Analyze a driving task in terms of perceptual, attentional, environmental and societal processes
• Analyze connections between key concepts and principles within the automotive context
• Evaluate how key concepts are applied in experimental research
• Create a simulation/experience showing automated driving in context, accurately representing the driving context and explicitly linking design choices to course concepts.

You must meet one of the following collections of requirements

• Collection 1
• Completed Final examination Bsc program
• Collection 2
• Completed Pre-Master

• Maurer, M., Gerdes, J. C., Lenz, B., & Winner, H. (2016). Autonomous driving: technical, legal and social aspects. Springer Nature. Open access book via https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-48847-8