Turing in the driver's seat: Can people distinguish between automated and manually driven vehicles?

As the number of automated vehicles is increasing on our roads, we wanted to know if people could detect if a car was being driven by a human driver or automation in a lane change task. This is particularly relevant, as most of the road collisions involve automated vehicles being struck from behind by manually driven vehicles. To address the detection of automated vehicles, an online survey presented videos of lane change maneuvers on multi-lane carriageways from behind the automated vehicle. We reasoned that, on such roads, the behavior of the vehicles in front would have more of an effect on drivers than those of the vehicles behind. To this end, an online survey was conducted with 769 people judging 60 video clips, classifying the lane change either being performed by Autopilot software or a human driver. Over 34,000 responses were recorded. It was found that automated and manual lane changes were virtually indistinguishable from the rear of the vehicle. The main conclusion of the research was that vehicles in automated mode should display this fact to other road users all around the vehicle as this may have an effect on other road users in anticipating the behavior of the other vehicle.