Traditional artificial potential field (APF) method can hardly be applied directly to intelligent vehicle local path planning, as it does not take into account the dynamics and kinematics constraints. A dynamic virtual obstacle based local path planning method was presented to solve this problem. Firstly, environment information, vehicle operation status and traffic rules were used to analyze driving safety, and the analytical expression of the virtual lane was deduced. Secondly, driving operation decision was made and constrained dynamic virtual obstacles were generated according to the decision. Finally, the local path was planned on the basis of an improved APF with dynamics and kinematics constraints. Simulation results show that the proposed method can achieve better planning performance at various initial speeds, relative speeds and relative distance under the condition of dynamics and kinematics constraints.