  A rather simple car driving simulator was created based on the available open
source engine TORCS and used to analyze the basic features of human behavior in
car driving within the car-following setups. Eight subjects with different
skill in driving real cars participated in these experiments. They were
instructed to drive a virtual car without overtaking the lead car driven by
computer at a fixed speed and not to lose sight of it. Moreover, these
experiments were conducted with four different speed including 60km/h, 80km/h,
100km/h, and 120km/h. Based on the collected data the distribution of the
headway, velocity, acceleration, and jerk are constructed and compared with
available experimental data collected previously by the analysis of the real
traffic flow. A new model for car-following is proposed capture the found
properties. As the main results we draw a conclusion that the human behavior in
car driving should be categorized as a generalized intermittent control with
noise-driven activation of the active phase. Besides, we hypothesize that the
extended phase space required for modeling human actions in car driving has to
comprise four phase variables, namely, the headway distance, the velocity of
car, its acceleration, and the car jerk, i.e., the time derivative of the car
acceleration. This time, the time pattern of pedal pushing and the distribution
of time derivative of pedal was utilized in addition to previous variables.
Moreover, all subjects' driving data were categorized as some styles with their
shapes.
