Steering Mental Models During Drifting: Can Drivers Understand Automated Counter-Steering?

Automated vehicle control beyond friction limits is an emerging technology that can further improve vehicle safety. This paper focuses on the driver's understanding of steering behavior during automated counter-steering. We hypothesize that: 1) motorsports fans or racing game players (GP) have a correct mental model of automated counter-steering, while 2) ordinary drivers (Non-GP) do not, and 3) Non-GP incorrectly estimate rotation direction as being always consistent between the steering wheel and vehicle. We first propose a method to examine the accuracy of a driver's steering mental model. The method measures the participants' ability to estimate steering wheel rotation from a video only showing vehicle rotation and vice versa. We compared the performance of GP and Non-GP using videos with and without counter-steering. The results only support hypothesis 2. This indicates that automated counter-steering likely confuses most drivers no matter their prior knowledge, which makes the improvement of driver-vehicle communication critical.