Vehicle driving cycles is a speed time curve used to describe the characteristics of vehicle driving in a specific traffic environment. It can represent the law of speed change in the tested area. The commonly used extraction methods of driving cycles are short stroke method and Markov chain method. However, in the mountainous areas of the plateau, the poor road environment makes the driving cycles very complex. The driving cycles of automobile in plateau area has the characteristics of small proportion of idling condition, and the result of using conventional short stroke method to construct driving cycles is not ideal. In view of this, this paper proposes an improved short stroke method, which uses three parameters of speed, torque and time to divide the kinematic segments. The collected test data is divided into one kinematic segment every 60s. If the value of the 60s torque in the kinematic segment is large (greater than 85% of the total test data), it is divided into the minimum value in the 55-65s interval. Compare the actual driving cycles with the extracted driving cycles, and it is found that the driving cycles constructed by the improved short distance method are consistent with the driving characteristics of vehicles in the plateau area.