Validating Driving Simulator for Car-Following Distance

Driving simulator (DS) can be introduced as a popular tool in the transport industry for the analysis of driving behavior. Simulators should be validated in term of each specific recorded data, separately. When DSs are the source of data, each part of data which indicates a maneuver or a behavior should be validated separately. This paper is dedicated to the validation of car-following distance in the presence of considerable traffic flow which may increase mental load. In general, the results showed that DSs could be used for determining the behaviors of a driver by focusing on headway and car-following behavior. The distance kept by male drivers was shorter than female participants. It was seen that drivers between the ages of 20–40 were suitable for car-following tests in the DS by considering all real driving tasks in a congested traffic condition. Car-following threshold headway was less than 2 s for 85% of the participants, which is quite similar to the past results from real data in Iran. The average car-following headway threshold in the DS was 0.8 s, which is less than field data (1.2 s).