In conventional driving, the driver represents the element between environment and vehicle. With the appearance of driver assistance systems, the tasks performed by the human driver are displaced. A portion of these tasks are fulfilled by systems.
In the first step of the development of such systems, the driver still holds the responsibility for vehicle guidance. This is justified by insufficient environmental detection by sensor technology, whose present level of development does not permit an error free detection of all situations. Therefore the driver must be informed suitably about the actual functions of the assistant, in order to be able to handle it appropriately. For a suitable transfer of information, a man-machine interface has to be created. On the one hand it has to transmit sufficient information to the driver, while on the other hand it should not overwhelm the driver with excessive information.