“Take over!” How long does it take to get the driver back into the loop?

Raising the automation level in cars is an imaginable scenario for the future in order to improve traffic safety. However, as long as there are situations that cannot be handled by the automation, the driver has to be enabled to take over the driving task in a safe manner. The focus of the current study is to understand at which point in time a driver’s attention must be directed back to the driving task. To investigate this issue, an experiment was conducted in a dynamic driving simulator and two take-over times were examined and compared to manual driving. The conditions of the experiment were designed to examine the take-over process of inattentive drivers engaged in an interaction with a tablet computer. The results show distinct automation effects in both take-over conditions. With shorter take-over time, decision making and reactions are faster but generally worse in quality.