An examination of teen drivers’ car-following behavior under naturalistic driving conditions: With and without an advanced driving assistance system

•The impact of an ADAS on age-related differences in drivers’ following behavior on real roads were examined.•Potential negative effects of ADAS on teen drivers’ following behavior were observed，but not for adult drivers.•Factors affecting drivers’ following behavior were investigated by mixed model analyses.•All adult drivers showed compensation behavior when driving at night, but no such behavior was observed in the teens.•ADAS can provide safety benefits to drivers, and it may also bring unexpected negative consequences. Teen drivers are overrepresented in motor vehicle crashes, and most studies concluded it was mainly due to their lack of experiences and tendencies of risk-taking. The design of advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) aims to provide assistance in multiple stages in human information processing during driving, including environmental sensing, information processing, decision making, and vehicle controlling, in order to improve driving safety. It is expected that novice drivers may benefit more from using ADAS than adult drivers as such technologies can compensate for their frequent errors. This study examined whether and how an integrated crash warning system impacted on drivers’ following behavior, and what were the corresponding age-related differences through an analysis of two unique naturalistic driving study datasets. Significant age-related differences in car-following behavior were found. Results showed potential negative effects of ADAS on teen drivers’ following behavior that teen drivers tended to have less controlled pedal use during treatment weeks with ADAS than during baseline weeks without ADAS, while such behavior was not observed in adult drivers. All adult drivers tended to keep longer headways when driving at night than during daytime to compensate for poor vision conditions, but no such compensation behavior was observed in the teens. In addition, teen and young-adult drivers had more aggressive following behavior (with shorter mean time headway) than middle-aged and older drivers. One limitation of this study is that the findings of this study are only addressing the short-term effect of ADAS exposure, and future studies are needed to examine the longitudinal effect. The findings of this study suggest that the design of future ADAS should consider minimizing potential negative impacts on teen driver behavior.