  The use of partially automated driving systems raises concerns about
potential responsibility issues, posing risk to the system safety, acceptance,
and adoption of these technologies. The concept of meaningful human control has
emerged in response to the responsibility gap problem, requiring the
fulfillment of two conditions, tracking and tracing. While this concept has
provided important philosophical and design insights on automated driving
systems, there is currently little knowledge on how meaningful human control
relates to subjective experiences of actual users of these systems. To address
this gap, our study aimed to investigate the alignment between the degree of
meaningful human control and drivers' perceptions of safety and trust in a
real-world partially automated driving system. We utilized previously collected
data from interviews with Tesla "Full Self-Driving" (FSD) Beta users,
investigating the alignment between the user perception and how well the system
was tracking the users' reasons. We found that tracking of users' reasons for
driving tasks (such as safe maneuvers) correlated with perceived safety and
trust, albeit with notable exceptions. Surprisingly, failure to track lane
changing and braking reasons was not necessarily associated with negative
perceptions of safety. However, the failure of the system to track expected
maneuvers in dangerous situations always resulted in low trust and perceived
lack of safety. Overall, our analyses highlight alignment points but also
possible discrepancies between perceived safety and trust on the one hand, and
meaningful human control on the other hand. Our results can help the developers
of automated driving technology to design systems under meaningful human
control and are perceived as safe and trustworthy.
