Abstract: Human-machine interaction (HMI) is about the interaction design inside the cockpit of vehicle. It takes the human-centered design approach related to systems that help driver or passengers’ communication with vehicles. Ensuring safer driving and more effective communication between the human and the vehicle is the central focus. Its design challenges have changed a lot due to the increasing level of autonomous driving. What kind of interaction will be the mainstream? How would a driver’s personality influence the driver’s attitude toward active safety and trust of the autonomous driving? How should HMI be designed for the handover scenarios from Level 3 to Level 5 autonomous driving? What HMI solutions make the driving safer and improve user experience?

This special issue includes eight papers. The first five papers seek to address the above questions by assessing the current approaches and technologies, as well as to outline the major challenges and future perspectives related to HMI technology applied in intelligent vehicles. The other three papers are related to autonomous driving.

We hope this special issue could motivate research in the vehicle HMI design and promote the building of quality criteria for automotive user interfaces and autonomous driving systems in the automotive industry.

We would first like to gratefully acknowledge and sincerely thank all the reviewers for their timely and insightful valuable comments and criticism of the manuscripts that greatly improved the quality of the final versions. Of course, thanks are due to the authors, who provided excellent papers and timely extended revisions. Finally, we are grateful to the editors of Automotive Innovation for their trust in us, their efforts, patience, and painstaking editorial work during the production of this special issue.