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The Naturalistic Driving is a three-phased effort designed to accomplish three objectives: Phase I, Conduct Test Planning Activities; Phase II, Conduct a Field Test; and Phase III, Prepare for Large-Scale Field Data Collection Effort. This report documents the efforts of Phase II. Project sponsors are the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Virginia Department of Transportation. The 100-Car Naturalistic Driving Study is the first instrumented-vehicle study undertaken with the primary purpose of collecting large-scale, naturalistic driving data. Drivers were given no special instructions, no experimenter was present, and the data collection instrumentation was unobtrusive. In addition, 78 of 100 vehicles were privately owned. The resulting database contains many extreme cases of driving behavior and performance, including severe drowsiness, impairment, judgment error, risk taking, willingness to engage in secondary tasks, aggressive driving, and traffic violations. The data set includes approximately 2,000,000 vehicle miles, almost 43,000 hours of data, 241 primary and secondary drivers, 12 to 14 months of data collection for each vehicle, and data from a highly capable instrumentation system including 5 channels of video and many vehicle state and kinematic sensors. From the data, an database was created, similar in classification structure to an epidemiological crash database, but with video and electronic driver and vehicle performance data. The events are crashes, near-crashes, and other incidents. Data are classified by pre-event maneuver, precipitating factor, event type, contributing factors, associative factors, and the avoidance maneuver. Parameters such as vehicle speed, vehicle headway, time-to-collision, and driver reaction time are also recorded. The current project specified ten objectives or goals that would be addressed through the initial analysis of the event database. This report addresses the first 9 of these goals, which include analyses of rear-end events, lane change events, the role of inattention, and the relationship between levels of severity. Goal 10 is a separate report and addresses the implications for a larger-scale data collection effort.
Dingus et al. (Sun,) studied this question.