Supporting Car-Following Behavior through V2V-Based Beyond-Visual-Range Information Display

Rear-end collisions constituted a large portion of crashes on the road, despite efforts to mitigate rear-end collisions, such as forward collision warnings. The chance of rear-end collisions is closely related to drivers' car-following (CF) behaviors in the traffic flow. Given that drivers may rely on more than the information of the direct lead vehicle (DLV) when making CF decisions, expanding drivers' perceptual range by providing beyond-visual-range (BVR) information based on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication may enhance CF safety. Thus, four different human-machine interfaces (HMIs) providing various types of BVR information in CF events were designed, including Brake-HMI showing only brake action of indirect lead vehicles (ILV), Dis-HMI and THW-HMI showing the relative distance and time headway between the ILV and DLV, respectively, and Video-HMI showing the live-stream video of ILV from the perspective of DLV. A driving simulator experiment with 40 participants was conducted to evaluate the impact of BVR-based HMI on driving safety in CF events. We found that, in general, BVR information could improve CF safety without overloading drivers and compromising their visual attention allocation strategies, particularly among novice drivers, by enabling quicker brake responses and increasing time headway and time-to-collision in brake events. The Brake-HMI yielded the safest performance in chain brake events, whereas Video-HMI increased attentional demands without observable benefits. This research provides insights into enabling drivers' BVR perception based on V2V communication to enhance driving safety in CF scenarios.