Event

Welcome to a SAFER Thursday lunch & networking seminar! This week the seminar is hosted by Linus Wågström, SAFER’s Research Area Director for Safety Performance Evaluation. Linus has invited Thomas Streubel from Volvo Cars Safety Centre.

Driver behavior changes when interacting with automated vehicles in real traffic
Speaker: Thomas Streubel, Senior Analysis Engineer, Volvo Cars Safety Centre

While automated vehicles are expected to have a great positive impact on traffic safety, the interaction between manual driven vehicles and automated vehicles remains unknown until their introduction in real traffic. Some of the challenging interactions occur in cut-in (manual driven car enters lane in front of automated vehicle) and rear-end approaching scenarios (manual driven car approaches automated vehicle from behind). An automated vehicle keeping an adequate safety gap in front and staying consistently below the speed limit may have an impact on frequency and riskiness of these scenarios.

As part of the L3Pilot project, automated vehicle prototypes were tested in normal traffic (treatment) and compared with a fleet of manual driven vehicles in the same environment (baseline). We investigated how surrounding driver's behavior differed when entering the lane in front of the test vehicles and approaching it from the rear. Measures of interest were indicators such as time headway (THW), distance, velocity, etc. We extracted 1646 cut-in and over 50 thousand rear-end events. All cut-ins were validated and manually annotated by video review in regards of motivation (discretionary vs mandatory).

The lower driven speed of the automated vehicle was expected to have potential safety implications of subsequent traffic. However, the observed effects were small and did not indicate a more risky behavior when approaching an automated vehicle compared to normal traffic. The increase in cut-in events at entry ramps indicates a system limitation to react to entering vehicles by changing lane or leaving space. This might lead to a decrease in acceptance.

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All SAFER Thursday lunch seminars will be held at the SAFER office and online, via Microsoft Teams, exclusively for SAFER partners. Missing your invitation, please contact Mikael von Redlich.