A field trial has been carried out using a set of automatic recording system, Driving Monitoring Recorder (DMR) with GPS and Event Eye Camera (EEC). They were installed on total numbers of 105 vehicles in four fleets of taxi and truck in Tokyo area for 4 years in order to assess the implications in driving characteristic and traffic conditions.

DMR can record the data such as running speed vs. time continually, and frequencies of emergency behavior are counted and recorded on drive whenever hard braking exceed by 3.75m/s2, and rapid starting and sharp acceleration exceed by 3.5 m/s2. Also, EEC can record the driver views in pre- and post scene during 10 seconds by event detecting trigger. The 80 subjects are taxi drivers including 10 females and 30 truck drives. The drivers were monitored for some months continuously. In addition, the drivers were examined by a driving aptitude test.

The analysis result indicates that individual driver have a specific driving performance on drives, and it suggest that drivers will be able to specified their driver characteristics by DMR data. For simplicity, we defined the “Index of bad behavior” score as simply adding points of numbers of the three emergency actions per 100 km running. The drivers are classified into 4 groups, ranked A, B, C and D levels according the index score, which ranging from careless driver to model of safety driver. The ranks are compared with the results of driving aptitude test. To assess driver behavior, EEC images were examined when, where and what condition emergency behavior occurred. As results of EEC image analysis, some drivers with high bad index scores had driven at the head mostly, and frequent rapid lane changing and sharp turn actions.

In conclusion, a set of the automatic recording systems can be offer useful data to study driver characteristics. In addition, the important aspect of this study is persuasively, most drivers tend to accept these data without complaining for improve their safety drive because of digital data and image data.