Designing Communication Strategies of Autonomous Vehicles with Pedestrians: An Intercultural Study

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have the opportunity to reduce accident and injury rates in urban areas and improve safety for vulnerable road users (VRUs). To realize these benefits, AVs have to communicate with VRUs like pedestrians. While there are proposed solutions concerning the visualization or modality of external human-machine interfaces, a research gap exists regarding the AVs’ communication strategy when interacting with pedestrians. Our work presents a comparative study of an autonomous delivery vehicle with three communication strategies ranging from polite to dominant in two scenarios, at a crosswalk or on the street. We investigated these strategies in an online-based video study in a German (N = 34) and a Chinese sample (N = 56) regarding compliance, acceptance and trust. We found that a polite strategy led to more compliance in the Chinese but not the German sample. However, the polite strategy positively affected trust and acceptance of the AV in both samples equally.