Citation

Lee J, McGehee DV, Brown T, Marshall D. Accid. Reconstr. J. 2009; 19(5): 10-17.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, Accident Reconstruction Journal)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This article reports on a study that assessed the ability of automobile drivers to make the transition from adaptive cruise control (ACC) to manual control when warned with alerts of different modalities. The authors compared how drivers maintain headway distance in conditions with and without ACC in mild, moderate, and severe braking situations. The different modalities tested include visual, auditory, seat vibration, brake pulse, and a combination of these methods. The two scenarios studied were a braking lead vehicle and an abrupt lane change of a lead vehicle that reveals a slow-moving vehicle. The study included sixty people aged 30 to 50 years, split evenly by gender and used to using cruise control (defined as at least twice per month). After a demographic questionnaire and pre-drive instruction, participants drove a 6-minute practice drive, followed by a 35-minute experimental drive. The results showed that ACC helped drivers maintain a larger safety margin, as measured by the minimum time-to-collision (TTC). The authors hypothesize that this larger safety margin may have important indirect benefits, affecting other drivers and the overall traffic flow rather than the likelihood of a crash for the driver using the ACC. The various alert modalities performed similarly when considered independently. There was a slightly greater minimum TTC associated with the brake pulse in moderately severe situations. Readers are referred to the full report at www.ntis.gov (access number PB2009-102474).


Keywords: Driver distraction;