Abstract & Overview
A consumer-facing automation taxonomy is proposed to address emergent issues of consumer confusion related to automation types and associated role responsibility. A set of surveys were fielded to help understand the extent to which consumers were able to accurately interpret a proposed consumer-facing taxonomy relative to the 6-level SAE J3016 taxonomy. Results show a mixed benefit of the proposed set over the J3016 set. For both term types and definitions, consumers were best able to differentiate the extremes of automation types, leading to the question of whether or not it may be beneficial to provide a simplified representation to communicate functionality. A binary framing (“driving” vs. “riding”) in place of a 6-level taxonomy is proposed to ensure consumer understanding.