Halliday, Resnick & Walker — Motion Along a Straight Line: Problem 103

Vehicle jerk indicating aggression. One common form of aggressive driving is for a trailing driver to repeat a pattern of accelerating suddenly to come close to the car in front and then braking suddenly to avoid a collision. One way to monitor such behavior, either remotely or with an onboard computer system, is to measure vehicle jerk, where jerk is the physics term for the time rate of change of an object’s acceleration along a straight path. Figure 2.38 is a graph of acceleration \( a \) versus time \( t \) in a typical situation for a car. Determine the jerk for each of the time periods: (a) gas pedal pushed down rapidly, 2.0 s interval, (b) gas pedal released, 1.5 s interval, (c) brake pedal pushed down rapidly, 1.5 s interval, (d) brake pedal released, 2.5 s interval.