  A fair simple car driving simulator was created based on the open source
engine TORCS and used in car-following experiments aimed at studying the basic
features of human behavior in car driving. Four subjects with different skill
in driving real cars participated in these experiments. The subjects were
instructed to drive a car without overtaking and losing sight of a lead car
driven by computer at a fixed speed. Based on the collected data the
distributions of the headway distance, the car velocity, acceleration, and jerk
are constructed and compared with the available experimental data for the real
traffic flow. A new model for the car-following is proposed to capture the
found properties. As the main result, we draw a conclusion that human actions
in car driving should be categorized as generalized intermittent control with
noise-driven activation. Besides, we hypothesize that the car jerk together
with the car acceleration are additional phase variables required for
describing the dynamics of car motion governed by human drivers.
