Preserving the Joy of Driving: A Context-Aware Conversational Companion for Road Trip Enthusiasts

Abstract

The transition toward highly automated vehicles is primarily driven by safety and efficiency, often overlooking subjective aspects of driving such as enjoyment, emotional engagement, and the pleasure of driving itself. These factors remain central to the mobility experience of drivers. We evaluate a context-sensitive, smartphone-based conversational companion that proactively delivers location-based narrative content through a Wizard-of-Oz setup in a field study (N = 20). To balance exploration with driving safety, conversational interventions were triggered based on contextual factors such as location, the current driving situation and social context. Although the system ranked in the top ten percent for novelty and stimulation in the global metrics of the UEQ, correlation analysis revealed a significant negative correlation with car passion. This suggests that preserving the joy of driving requires personalized conversational agency, where systems must intelligently distinguish between exploratory and performance-oriented driving contexts.