Comparison of driving habits of drivers living in Hungary and Romania

People have a basic need for moving – since the very beginning. What has changed is the hows and the whys of the route. With the advancement of technology we can travel more faster and more comfortable. Of course, not only the vehicles themselves, but also the devices inside them are becoming more modern and faster. One of the - maybe the most important - tools is the built-in navigation. It should have fast response time and it must provide appropriate amount of information to the driver.

We assumed that driving habits are influenced by lot of things, such as age, sex or residence. Drivers living in Hungary and Romania were examined in our project. Hungary is in Central Europe, in the Carpathian Basin. With about 10 million residents, it is a medium-sized member state of the European Union. Romania is at the junction of Central, Eastern, and South-eastern Europe and it is the 12th largest country and also the 7th most populous member state of the EU with almost 20 million inhabitants. The area difference between the two countries is already one aspect, which is supposed to be associated with different driving habits. Differences in road quality, GDP or infrastructure can also have an effect on it.

To test the assumptions we created two Google Forms - one for the Hungarian drivers (in Hungarian) and one for those who live in Romania. The latter was available in both Romanian and Hungarian, because the largest minority group in Romania are the Hungarians – in terms of the questionnaire the border of the countries were relevant. Both questionnaires had the same structure (three parts) and questions: the first parts contain 17 general, mandatory questions like age, education level, questions about the driver’s car (brand, age). Navigation habits are closely linked to driving habits and we put more emphasis on it. Depending on whether someone is using built-in car navigation or not, we have asked different questions – 3 if the filler does not have one, and 30 if he/she has in-built car navigation GPS. Most of our questions were about these tools but we gathered some information about mobile application usage too.

There are similarities and also differences in the results. Hungarian drivers have few years older cars (in average) than the Romanian cars (which is equivalent to the EU average), but most of them drive “second hand” cars (in both countries). Consequently, most people could not choose whether they would like a built-in GPS or not. Few respondents said that they would not use the device under any circumstances. So it can be said that people basically do not consider GPS unnecessary or discarded. The number of people who own and use in-built car GPS is roughly the same in the two countries.

 

 

 

 

FV is supported by the ÚNKP-19-3 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry for Innovation and Technology.