Familiar Faces Could Help Robot Cars Win Trust

“We think that the most prominent ‘bump’ in the road to successful implementation of smart cars is not the technology itself but, rather, the acceptance of that technology by the public,” said Frank Verberne, a behavioral scientist at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, in a press release. “Representing such complex automation technology with something that humans are familiar with—namely, a human behind the wheel—may cause it to become less of a ‘black box.’”