Controlled simulation experiment demonstrates dual-mechanism driving impairment from photovoltaic glare in expressway drivers, highlighting safety improvements from warning prompts.
The rapid expansion of photovoltaic installations along expressways has raised concerns regarding glare exposure and its potential impact on driving safety. This study employed a controlled driving simulation to examine the effects of glare intensity and incident angle on driver performance. Illumination intensity was set at three levels (A > B > C), with five incident angles (−60°, −30°, 0°, +30°, +60°). A total of 36 participants completed the experiments, yielding 540 valid samples. A two-stage analytical framework was adopted, combining analysis of variance to quantify main and interaction effects with gradient boosting regression and SHapley Additive exPlanations(SHAP) to capture nonlinear responses and identify key contributors.Results reveal a dual-mechanism impairment pattern. Speed regulation and braking were most affected under high-intensity frontal glare, while steering stability and visual comfort were more sensitive to large incident angles under lower illumination. Frontal glare (0°) posed the highest risk across all intensities. Warning prompts significantly mitigated impairment, reducing speed-stability impact by up to 86.6% under critical conditions. Vehicle speed further moderated these effects, with substantial amplification above 110 km/h.These findings provide quantitative insights for developing engineering countermeasures to enhance safety in photovoltaic-integrated expressway environments.
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Guo et al. (2026) studied this question.