Abstract With the rapid growth of the electric vehicle market, one-pedal driving has become a widely adopted feature in modern electric vehicles. This study addresses two key questions of one-pedal driving: (1) its influence on electric vehicle car-following behavior, and (2) its interaction with adaptive cruise control. To explore these questions, field experiments were conducted to empirically compare one-pedal and two-pedal driving under both manual control and adaptive cruise control settings. Statistical and comparative analyses reveal significant behavioral differences across control settings. Under manual control, one-pedal driving produces more pronounced speed oscillations and sharper decelerations with quicker responses, primarily because acceleration and braking are managed solely through the accelerator pedal. Drivers, especially those less experienced, struggle with fine speed modulation, resulting in greater variability. These findings highlight the need to account for driver familiarity and heterogeneity when modeling one-pedal driving behavior. Under adaptive cruise control, one-pedal driving yields narrower distributions of speed, acceleration, and spacing, indicating smoother and more conservative control, while both modes exhibit similar response delays. This suggests that integrating one-pedal driving with adaptive cruise control can attenuate disturbance propagation and enhance platoon stability. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of one-pedal driving’s influence on car-following behavior and provide practical insights for developing and tuning adaptive cruise control systems that effectively leverage regenerative braking to improve traffic flow efficiency and system stability.
Zhu et al. (Mon,) studied this question.