An Exploratory Study of Higher Order Driving Skills and Difficult Situations Experienced by Novice Drivers During Their First Months of Driving to Develop Simulation-based Training

Road Safety is a major societal issue worldwide, especially for novice drivers (ND). Youngness as well as poor high-order-driving-skills (HODS) are associated with the ND over-representation in road crashes [28]. Most studies focusing on road risks in newly licensed drivers use data referring to crash situations [37], but little is known about difficulties they experience daily while driving. This paper reports the first results of an exploratory study on difficult situations experienced by ND during their first months of driving. 48 young ND were interviewed using the Critical Incident Technique. 92 Critical incidents were obtained representing a wide set of perceived-as-difficult situations by ND that goes beyond typical road crash or near-crash situations. The analysis suggests that poor HODS, lack of collective driving skills and cognitive load due to inexperience might also explain these difficult situations. We plan to clarify the HODS involved in all the collected difficult situations while considering the framework of non-technical-skills (NTS) [14] for the development of training scenario for simulation-based driving education and assessment.