Improvements in Perpendicular Reverse Parking by Directing Drivers’ Preliminary Behavior

Driving vehicles requires mastery of a multitude of tasks. Among these, parking is one task that most drivers feel they are not as skilled as they would like to be. In this paper, we focus on improvement of reverse perpendicular parking performance. We began our research by conducting fixed-point observations in a private parking lot to analyze parking behavior in situ. Our analysis indicated that the start position of reversing is the most important aspect of successfully navigating into a target parking space. We then examined the effect of delivering instructions to assist in preliminary vehicle control by giving a target drawn on the road using a head-mounted display-based driving simulator. The results indicated that explicit instructions improve the parking performance for spatial offset, but the effect on the time required for the task could not be clearly confirmed. In summary, directing drivers to alter their preliminary behavior in the perpendicular parking task might be practically useful for improving their performance.