Follow Me: Exploring Strategies and Challenges for Collaborative Driving

Current research on Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication aims at improving interaction between different vehicles by communication technologies and is mainly focused on driver-to-driver interaction. But how do drivers and passengers of two vehicles that have the same destination communicate with each other? In such a collaborative driving scenario, several factors such as the environmental context or the behavior of the vehicle occupants may influence the communication. In order to explore how information is exchanged in collaborative driving, we conducted an exploratory in-situ study with seven groups of two driver/co-driver pairs each, located in two separate vehicles. During the ride, the participants had to drive collaboratively on a predefined route solving different subtasks. We found that different social (e.g., driving habits, unpredicted intentions) and contextual factors (e.g., night/rain conditions, size or color of the vehicle) influenced collaboration. Our findings provide a deeper understanding of collaborative driving and inform future V2V communication designs.