Drivers Distrust Parking Assistance Solutions, but Human Factors Can Help
By Yiqi Zhang
Features employing artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming the new standard for today’s vehicles, transforming the driving experience around the world. Although self-driving cars remain under development, parking-assistance solutions have become increasingly more integrated into registered vehicles, offering an innovative approach to streamline parking and reduce congestion.
However, consumers often distrust these parking-assistance features and have little faith in their ability to help them park correctly and efficiently. In this context, understanding how people interact with these technologies is crucial. Automakers need to view AI features through the lens of human factors and ergonomics (HF/E), the science of designing systems, technologies, and environments that fits the needs and capabilities of humans to enhance safety, efficiency, and user-friendliness. Without this perspective, consumer distrust will complicate efforts by parking operators to implement smart-parking procedures that rely on these parking-assistance solutions.
This article will explore the benefits and potential drawbacks of parking-assistance solutions, how these features can be adapted to make consumers feel safer, and their potential benefits to the parking industry.
Benefits, Risks of Smart Parking Solutions
Parking can be one of the most time-consuming and inefficient aspects of driving. In his article “Pricing curb parking” in the December 2021 issue of the journal Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Donald Shoup, a distinguished research professor in the Department of Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, noted that 30% of traffic in cities is due to people cruising for parking alone. This practice adds to congestion on city streets that are already crowded with pedestrians, cyclists, and various other transit systems.
Creating solutions that can ensure safety while also reducing the stress and frustration that accompany parking in congested cities and parking lots likely would entice consumers.
Ongoing advancements in smart parking and automated parking technologies are set to significantly transform parking operations. Smart parking systems provide real-time information about available spaces, pricing, and locations, enabling drivers to reserve spots in advance, reduce time spent searching for parking, and enhance the overall efficiency and environmental sustainability of parking facilities.
Automated parking systems, also known as parking-assistance technology, are included as part of certain newer vehicles and are designed to help drivers in various ways, improving the parking experience and enhancing safety.
Parking-assistance solutions come in various forms from backup cameras to remote parking assistance. These are the most common examples of such solutions in order of least to most complex:
- Backup and surround-view cameras provide a visual display of the area behind the car when it is in reverse gear or the near surroundings on part or all sides of the car when it is stopped or during low-speed maneuvers.
- Passive parking assistance provides the driver with visual, auditory, and tactile warnings throughout the normal parking process, with the driver maintaining control over the car’s steering and braking.
- Active parking assistance enables the driver to relinquish control of the vehicle’s steering, acceleration, brakes, and gear positions, with supervision from the driver. The available parking options may vary depending on the specific model and can include parallel parking, perpendicular parking, and reverse-in parking.
- Remote parking assistance enables cars to park and unpark themselves using an active parking assistance system. The driver is required to continuously oversee this function and retain accountability for parking, although their physical presence inside the vehicle is not necessary for its operation.
According to the April 2022 Bulletin from the Highway Loss Data Institute, rear parking sensors were available in 52% of U.S. registered vehicles in 2021. In 2026, this figure is expected to increase to 60% of the registered vehicle fleet, while 71% of vehicles are expected to have rear cameras.
Consumer Hesitation
For customers, smart features contribute to a safer driving experience with fewer injuries and accidents that often occur in parking facilities.
Parking-assistance systems potentially could benefit parking operations by increasing efficiency and maximizing available parking space. For example, autonomous valet parking could enable vehicles to park themselves, freeing drivers from maneuvering into tight spaces and optimizing the use of available parking spots.
By adopting these innovative solutions, parking facilities can lower operational expenses, reduce damage claims, increase revenue, and attract more customers.
However, consumers are hesitant to use new parking-assistance solutions in vehicles because their performance differs from manual parking, particularly in terms of slower movements and different parking styles than the driver is expecting. Along with sometimes having faulty alarms for detecting traffic, parking-assistance technology does not detect children, pedestrians, bicyclists, animals, or objects that are moving, protruding, or located too far above or below the cameras, as well as too close or too far away.
All these potential risks with smart parking features contribute to consumers’ distrust in automated parking systems. In a study titled “Trust and Distrust of Automated Parking in a Tesla Model X” that appeared in the March 2020 issue of the journal Human Factors, researchers from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, the U.S. Air Force Academy, and the University of West Virginia showed that consumers who use partially automated features with little knowledge of how they work can experience a high degree of initial distrust.
Studies have shown that users’ trust can increase with repeated exposure, especially during initial acquaintance and use of the system. However, consumers will need time and patience to learn how these new features work and know when they need to intervene.
Better, Safer Design and Use Through Human Factors
With these risks and benefits in mind, incredible potential exists to make smart parking usable and accessible for all, starting by putting humans at the center of the design. Human factors can help contextualize smart parking features as a new collaborative relationship between the driver and the vehicle. Humans and vehicles need to be able to communicate clearly and consistently for the two parties to work together.
Besides improving parking performance and efficiency, the vehicle itself needs to transparently communicate how it is parking the car, identify any obstacles that are in the way, and indicate how it is handling any potential accidents. The parking process and movement should align with drivers’ mental model, which requires the technology to continuously train on large, diverse data sets to predict human behavior on the road.
Drivers need to trust that the vehicle will perform parking maneuvers in a predictable way, but they also need to keep paying attention to the parking operation and intervene when needed. Trust will be further enhanced by greater transparency and increased knowledge about what the system is doing and how the automated parking system works. Drivers will have to take time to understand how a vehicle’s automatic parking system works and how it indicates that the vehicle will stop before hitting an object.
The Future of Smart Parking
To build trust with consumers regarding new smart parking features, automakers must develop and implement solutions from a human-first perspective to address usability, accessibility, and perceived benefits. By viewing AI features through the HF/E lens, automakers can better articulate the capabilities and limitations of self-driving cars to consumers who may have safety concerns.
As we look ahead at smart parking, significant opportunity exists to make parking safer and more reliable. If these features are designed to be more accessible, the parking industry can begin considering other innovations like automated valet parking in which cars can self-park in pre-selected parking spots or sensor-based parking operations.
Securing human drivers’ trust will be critical to making these features successful and fostering a safer future for all.
Yiqi Zhang is an associate professor in the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering and the director of the Human-Technology Interaction Laboratory at the Pennsylvania State University. Zhang, who is currently serving as the chair for the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society’s Human Performance Modeling Technical Group, can be reached at yuz450@psu.edu.
