Accident; analysis and prevention
-
Previous studies have shown the effect of a lead vehicle's speed, deceleration rate and headway distance on drivers' brake response times. However, how drivers perceive this information and use it to determine when to apply braking is still not quite clear. To better understand the underlying mechanisms, a driving simulator experiment was performed where each participant experienced nine deceleration scenarios. ⋯ However, regardless of looming metric, the accumulator models fitted the distribution of brake response times better than the pure threshold models. Accumulator models, including brake lights, provided a better model fit than looming-only versions. For all versions of the mechanistic models, models using τ-1 as the measure of looming fitted better than those using θ˙, indicating that the visual cues drivers used during rear-end collision avoidance may be more close to τ-1.