A self-driving car, also known as a robot car, autonomous car, or driverless car, is a vehicle that is capable of sensing the environment it’s in and moving with little or no human assistance. Currently, there are issues occurring with Tesla’s Auto Pilot that are causing many people to have crashes while on the highway and busy intersections. Although Automatous vehicles are currently not on the road right now, there is heavy research being conducted that will determine our future with self-driving vehicles. In the near future, there will be driverless vehicles on the road and manufacturers are steadily revolutionizing to the point where customers soon may not be speaking to an Uber driver, but instead an agent (for example, “Siri” or “Alexa”). It is significantly important in the urban community (specifically for people of color) that we start thinking about how this will affect people in different environments and the nation as a whole. We are exploring this issue by examining how a person’s behavior can change in an in-cabin experience based on the type of agent they encounter and our hypothesis suggests that people behave differently with a disembodied agent.
