Abstract-This paper presents a cross-regional study that examined the difference on drivers' preference and behaviors when driving with driver advisory systems between Swedish and Chinese drivers. A drive simulator study was conducted in both countries. Two interfaces were proposed: Design 1 presents directional information; Design 2 combines directional and road user icons. The results showed Swedish drivers perceived a higher acceptance score of the systems than Chinese drivers. Swedish and Chinese drivers expressed different information needs on different regions around the car. When driving with design 2, Swedish and Chinese reduced the number of collisions by 13% and 18% respectively, compared with driving without any system. The brake-to-minimum TTC proved that Swedish and Chinese drivers utilized the systems differently. These findings indicate drivers' preferences and strategies towards advisory systems are highly culturally mediated, and adaptive design for different drivers is highly recommended.Index Terms-Cross-culture, drive advisory system, driving behavior, driver preference.
I. INTRODUCTIONAutonomous Driving (AD) cars are developing very fast for its possibility of enhancing traffic efficiency, safety and CO2 emission. During the transition period from total manual driving, to assist automation till full-automated drive, many new human factor problems appear. One of the problems is that drivers may over-rely on the automation systems and it could lead to reduced Situation Awareness (SA), which induce problems in reclaiming control when necessary [1]. Thus, to support SA, we need a system that provide the driver with a foresight on up-coming situations, and helps the driver with decision making on resuming control when necessary, the system should facilitate the interaction between a driver and automated systems [2], [3].Meanwhile, with the rapid development of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) technology, many warning designs have been implemented in vehicles, such as Forward Collision Warning (FCW), Lane Departure Warning (LDW) and so on. Recently, researchers have pointed out that ADAS should focus more on design for SA to provide the driver with attention support, rather than on warnings [4], [5].One of the challenges of ADAS design is to understand Manuscript received September 20, 2014; revised February 23, 2015. Min Juan Wang, Lian Duan, Jia Xin Wang, and Fang Chen are with the division of Interaction Design and Technology, Institute of Apply IT, Chalmers University, 412 96 Chalmers, Göteborg, Sweden (e-mail: minw@chalmers.se).Lin Li, Dong Sun, and Xi Chan Zhu are with Safety Research, Institute of Automobile, Tongji University,4800 Cao An Highway, Shanghai, China.how drivers' needs are changing in the transition period from manual drive to AD. With the technology development, sensor technologies, algorithms for full-automated cars would be ready in the near future, but the drivers might not ready for it. One of the reason is the drivers not have enough confidence to hand over their...