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The avoidance behavior of drivers over the age of 65 was compared with drivers under the age of 60 years in an emergent traffic situation where an obstacle vehicle drives into a blind intersection in a driving simulator. The drivers generally tended to do their best driving as the required reaction time in the situation decreased. However, the avoidance performances of the older drivers were more restricted than those of younger drivers; e.g., the maximum steering velocity was around 250 deg/s for the older drivers but 450 deg/s for the younger drivers. The older drivers needed a greater time margin, ranging from 1.35 to 2.7 s, than the younger drivers to successfully complete the avoidance. It was suggested that the avoidance abilities of the older drivers could be attributed to their mental and physical traits; their avoidance performances were remarkably improved by presenting advanced auditory warnings 3.0 seconds before their arrival at the intersection.

Analysis of vehicle motion under conditions of lateral wind disturbance is important for evaluating handling properties and vehicle stability. In the analysis, identification of vehicle dynamics is often carried out, and data for the identification is usually measured by a test with a lateral wind generator. However, vehicle transient response in the test usually converges for a short duration because of the limitation of the wind width. If the identification carried out from this data by conventional methods such as FFT, fine frequency resolution is not gained. In this research, an identification method based on the autoregressive model (AR-method), which is robust for a phenomenon of short duration, has been applied to the analysis of vehicle dynamics under the conditions in order to solve the above issue.