Title: How does driving behavior change when following an eco-driving car?
Abstract:To realize the sustainable transportation system in Japan, the issue to reduce CO2 emission made by the automobiles has become very serious. Among the countermeasures discussed and proposed, the eco-d...To realize the sustainable transportation system in Japan, the issue to reduce CO2 emission made by the automobiles has become very serious. Among the countermeasures discussed and proposed, the eco-driving has been treated as very important and believed to be very effective. The eco-driving means changing the driving styles to be much more economically and ecologically. This does not only apply to the cars doing the eco-driving but also affect the cars following the eco-driving cars. Furthermore, by considering most of the studies up to now had been based on the computer simulations and there had been only a few studies that were based on the real situation, we conducted a test run by using vehicles on the public roads under the normal traffic conditions. This paper is to report a part of the results of our test run. The driving data were recorded by the on board unit FCM-GPS MMC produced by TECHTOM being used together with EC15WWF-40. The driving behaviors of the followed cars were recorded by the video camera taken from the back window of the last car of the eco-driving vehicle queue. The analysis mainly on that how many cars kept in following and how many cars gave up the following and then overtook the eco-driving car. As a result, we found that whether the following cars change their behaviors also depends on how perfect the followed car does the eco-driving. Here, the eco-driving is described by three indicators: tenderly starting, less change of speed and early accelerator off. Moreover, whether the eco-driving car has a sticker or not affected the behavior of the following cars, too.Read More