The Personality Behind the Wheel: Conversational Agent Design as a Strategic Asset for Automotive Brands

Abstract

As vehicles progress toward higher levels of autonomy, human–vehicle interaction will increasingly shift from driving-related tasks toward conversational engagement, highlighting the importance of conversational agent design. This paper presents a multi-method investigation of user-centered and brand-consistent visualization strategies for in-car conversational agents (ICAs), combining a quantitative survey based on personality and brand frameworks, an exploratory benchmarking analysis of existing automotive conversational agents, and an experimental study in a simulated driving environment examining responses to varying levels of visual abstraction and anthropomorphism. Preliminary results suggest that functional reliability and voice interaction quality form the primary acceptance baseline, while visual representation serves as a secondary and strategically differentiating layer. Rather than highly anthropomorphic or complex visualizations, adaptive concepts offering adjustable expressiveness, personalization, and modular abstraction emerge as a robust design direction for integrating ICAs into vehicle identity, user experience, and long-term human–machine relationships.