In recent years, the number of autonomous vehicles in use, ranging from unmanned aircraft and fork lifts to automatic lawn mowers and vacuum cleaners, has increased rapidly. Being autonomous, these vehicles all have a more or less sophisticated planning and control system. But most of them also have some sort of interface, allowing a human operator to influence the behavior of the vehicle. In this talk, we will discuss the advantages of using an optimization approach when designing the operator interfaces, as well as the planning and control systems, of autonomous vehicles. We will also see examples of how such an approach can be implemented in systems using varying planning horizon lengths.