  Unpleasant social interactions on the road can negatively affect driving
safety. At the same time, researchers have attempted to address social
discomfort by exploring Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) as social
mediators. Before knowing whether CUIs could reduce social discomfort in a car,
it is necessary to understand the nature of social discomfort in shared rides.
To this end, we recorded nine families going on drives and performed
interaction analysis on this data. We define three strategies to address social
discomfort: contextual mediation, social mediation, and social support. We
discuss considerations for engineering and design, and explore the limitations
of current large language models in addressing social discomfort on the road.
