Driver Car Following Behavior Under Test Track and Open Road Driving Condition

This paper describes the results of an experiment concerning driver behavior in car following tasks. The motivation for this experiment was a desire to understand typical driver car following behavior as a guide for setting the automatic control characteristics of an ACC (Adaptive Cruise Control) system. Testing was conducted under both test track and open road driving conditions. The results indicate that car following is carried out under much lower bandwidth conditions than typical steering processes. Dynamic analysis shows driver time delay in response to lead vehicle velocity change on the order of several seconds. Typical longitudinal acceleration distributions show standard deviations of less than 0.05 g (acceleration due to gravity). Distributions of time headway (following distance divided by following vehicle speed) show conservative behavior by some subjects while others had median values on the order of 1.0 second, and significant occurrences of following between 0.5 and 1.0 seconds.