Editorial: Trust, safety and passenger experience in Intelligent Mobility

Intelligent Mobility (IM) has been transforming the way people and goods travel, providing benefits and opportunities for optimized logistics and travel time (e.g., through seamless mobility). Indeed, IM infrastructure trends have opened up new avenues for considering (and designing) how to best connect different transport modalities to accommodate more inclusivity, accessibility and efficiency in travel. More importantly IM appears to change the way passengers experience technologies as the nature of IM infrastructure [e.g., Automated Vehicles (AVs), Smart Roads, etc.] challenge notions of trust and safety while at the same time create new modes of interactions within cars and with the transport environment. Intelligent Mobility has direct implications on vehicle interior's design but also introduces novel opportunities and challenging “traditional” problems (e.g., Trolley Problem) for managing “external” interactions i.e., interactions with the natural environment whether this includes people (e.g., pedestrians) or not. In this Editorial we have the pleasure to host a very interesting Research Topic of unique papers that span across different areas in IM including research findings regarding designing Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs) for car interiors, IM in city contexts e.g., how drivers' behavior and trust influence intelligent infrastructure acceptability or how human behavior gets affected when using automated and self-driving shuttles. We also have papers that address the key aspect of accessibility and inclusivity and how representative user groups view IM emphasizing the importance to approach mobility as a service while emphasizing the role of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies play in designing and testing automated driving.