Elderly Drivers: What Errors Do they Commit on the Road?

Abstract

The elderly population represents a widely recognized issue in the field of road transportation. These people play an increasingly large role on the road, which gives rise to a certain number of questions, notably concerning their ability to integrate into their driving habits the potential advances offered by technological systems that are supposed to help the driver. But above and beyond the relatively general data on the problems they are confronted with, little is known about the particular nature of the difficulties they have and the errors they commit on the road, nor of the special characteristics of the accident scenarios they are involved in. In-depth research has been undertaken to contribute to our understanding of this situation, using an analysis of detailed data gathered by multidisciplinary teams at accident scenes. These data are analyzed using an error classification frame developed during previous studies, based on an investigation of over 400 accident situations. This model is used to make a link between the main functional stages of human activity as described in ergonomic literature and the types of specific failures which correspond to the particularities of the processes involved in deterioration in driving situations. Once identified and categorized, the errors that drivers are confronted with are re-introduced into typical dysfunction scenarios which explain how they come about. The purpose of this empirical paper is to stress the specificity of accidents scenarios which elderly drivers are involved in.