Perceived safety and trust in SAE Level 2 partially automated cars: Results from an online questionnaire
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0260953
archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified
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Summary
This study investigates drivers’ perceived safety, trust, and behavioral engagement with SAE Level 2 partially automated vehicles (PAVs), addressing concerns regarding automation misuse and the calibration of trust. The research was motivated by incidents involving systems like Tesla’s Autopilot, where drivers exhibited unsafe behaviors such as prolonged hands-free driving or ignoring warnings, potentially due to over-trust or mode confusion. The authors aimed to quantify how drivers perceive the safety and trustworthiness of these systems, how these perceptions relate to each other, and how they influence the acceptance and use of automation. The researchers conducted an online survey targeting current users of PAVs equipped with Adaptive Cruise Control and Lane Keeping Assistance. Recruitment occurred via QR codes at Tesla supercharging stations, owner forums, social media groups, and internal communications at Toyota Motor Europe. After strict data filtering to exclude bots, incomplete responses, and non-licensed drivers, 1,137 valid responses were analyzed. Participants rated their attitudes, trust, perceived safety, and engagement in secondary tasks using Likert scales. The study employed confirmatory factor analysis to validate the measurement model and structural equation modeling (SEM) to test relationships between latent variables, including perceived safety, trust, performance expectancy, driver engagement, and automation use. Results indicated high levels of trust and perceived safety among respondents. Drivers reported high trust in the system’s ability to maintain speed and distance (M = 4.41/5) and felt safe most of the time (M = 4.22/5). Most respondents always knew when the system was active (M = 4.42/5) and monitored performance most of the time (M = 4.34/5). Explicit engagement in non-driving activities was rated low (M = 2.27/5), and unsafe behaviors were rare, with only 1% reporting they rarely monitored the road and 1% reporting sleeping during automation. However, the proportion of drivers engaging in secondary tasks like texting, navigation, and eating was higher during PAV use than during manual driving. SEM revealed a strong positive relationship between perceived safety and trust (β = 0.69, p = 0.001). Performance expectancy had the strongest effect on automation use, followed by driver engagement, trust, and non-driving task engagement. Perceived safety influenced automation use indirectly through trust. The findings suggest that while drivers generally trust and feel safe in SAE Level 2 systems, there is a modest shift toward secondary task engagement compared to manual driving. The strong link between perceived safety and trust highlights the importance of calibrating these perceptions to ensure safe system use. The authors conclude that future research should examine the temporal development of trust and safety perceptions and further investigate the roles of driver engagement and secondary task involvement in shaping trust in partial automation.
Provenance
The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed.
| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | OpenAlex-citations | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| archive | success | unpaywall | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-25 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-26 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 6 | 2026-06-18 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-26; verification: verified.
Topics
Ranked by relevance to this paper. Hover a topic for its definition.
- trust calibration
- automation
- acceptance adoption
- trust in automation foundations
- automation surprise
- situational awareness
Information type
What kind of knowledge this paper contributes, grouped by family — independent of topic (what it is about) and method (how it was studied).
- Empirical Findings: self report data, observational prevalence
- Theoretical Contribution: conceptual framework