Researchers: Driverless cars can't just be safe. They also need to be nice.

Turns out, we may not actually want driverless cars to drive like us. That's according to researchers at the University of Michigan, who say they've found three core "personality" traits autonomous vehicles need to have to make people feel safer with them - even if they themselves don't have those same traits. Car makers already know some drivers still feel weird about the idea of sharing the road with an AV, much less actually using one. "That's partly because [autonomous vehicles] are designed purely from the technical perspectives, and those don't necessarily comply with our human social norms," says X. Jessie Yang, a professor in U of M's Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering, and the School of Information. "Like consider you're a pedestrian who wants to cross the street," she adds. "When you're interacting with a human driving a car, you'll have eye contact.