Models of Driver Acceleration Behavior Prior to Real-World Intersection Crashes

Drivers involved in intersection collisions are at high risk of serious or fatal injury. Intersection advanced driver assistance systems (I-ADAS) are emerging active safety systems designed to help drivers safely traverse intersections. The effectiveness of I-ADAS is expected to be greatly dependent on pre-crash vehicle acceleration during intersection traversals. The objective of this paper was to develop pre-crash acceleration models for non-turning drivers involved in straight crossing path crashes and left-turning drivers in left turn across path opposite direction and lateral direction crashes. This paper used 348 event data recorder pre-crash records taken from crashes investigated as part of the National Automotive Sampling System/Crashworthiness Data System. The acceleration models generated from this pre-crash data were evaluated using a leave-one-out cross-validation procedure. Previously developed non-crash models from the literature were compared with the pre-crash models. Our hypothesis was that drivers involved in crashes would accelerate more aggressively than the “typical” driving population. This result suggests that drivers in pre-crash scenarios tend to accelerate more aggressively than drivers in normal scenarios (p<;0.001). This has important implications for the design of I-ADAS. Specifically, higher acceleration results in less available time for I-ADAS to detect and respond to an imminent collision.