Driving Confidence in a Connected Vehicle Environment: A Case Study of Emergency Braking Events of Front Vehicles

Driving confidence psychology can guide drivers in calm driving operation when dealing with traffic issues, which is of substantial significance for reducing the accident rate and improving the road traffic efficiency. This study mainly analyzes the differences in driving confidence psychology in the face of an emergency braking event of a front vehicle with warning as opposed to the same situation without warning information. First, an emergency braking event of a front vehicle in a connected vehicle environment was designed based on driving simulation technology, which can provide warning information from the emergency-braking vehicle by using an onboard human-machine interface (HMI). Second, the features of lateral lane position changing and the average angle of the gas pedal were used to analyze the differences in driving confidence with versus without warning information. Finally, the entropy weight method was used to obtain the driving confidence degree of each driver in both scenarios. The results demonstrate that the driving confidence level is higher when warning information is provided, and the average driving confidence degree is 2.11% higher than the average driving confidence degree without warning information.