A cross-cultural analysis of driving behavior under critical situations: A driving simulator study

•Participants’ risk avoiding behaviors are sensitive to cultural difference in this study.•Chinese participants maintain a higher speed in the stated scenario.•Chinese participants have a longer reaction time than German participants in the stated scenario. Driving simulators are useful tools for traffic safety researches as they can create repeatable scenarios that cannot be easily created in real world. The present study investigated whether there existed significant differences in risk-avoiding behaviors between Chinese and German young male student drivers when interacting with vulnerable traffic participants. Twenty Chinese and twenty-one German young male drivers were recruited to perform a series of simulated driving including three scenarios of traffic conflict: (1) motorbike lane violation (2) pedestrian crossing urban street (3) Animal (wild boar) crossing highway road. A questionnaire-based survey about subjective assessment of the severity of the conflicts was conducted after experiment. Using data collected from the driving simulator and questionnaire, differences in risk-avoiding behaviors between two groups of drivers were tested. Results showed that Chinese young male drivers would maintain a higher speed in scenario (1), they also had a higher score of severity of conflicts in scenario (1) and (3). German young male drivers had a shorter reaction time under the same time-to-collision (TTC) in scenario (3), and they had a shorter reaction time in the case of a longer time-to-collision (TTC) in scenario (1).