You do the talking. Passengers are happy when the automation decides on cooperation

When driving autonomously, there is huge potential for connected vehicles to improve not only safety and comfort, but also traffic flow or road capacity. Via coordination of the driving maneuvers of several vehicles it is possible to automate cooperative driving behavior and even further increase traffic flow. Humans however do not like to be dominated by automated systems. Hence, the question arises on how an automated system should react if a cooperation would be possible. In order to investigate this, we designed an assistance system that could trigger requests for cooperation in merging scenarios and perform different maneuvers (lane-change or braking) depending on the traffic situation. It provided the participant with sufficient time to either accept or decline incoming requests and when no active choice was made, a default reaction (either cooperative behavior, uncooperative behavior or triggering a take-over request) was shown by the system. Results in terms of cooperation rate and system acceptance indicate that the automation should either behave cooperatively or uncooperatively with a slight favor for cooperative behavior. In general, performing a lane-change in order to enable cooperation was favorable compared to braking.