In order to improve the efficiency and quality of vehicle drivability evaluation, a drivability evaluation model based on principal component analysis, extreme gradient boosting tree and sparrow optimization algorithm is proposed. In this paper, the power upshift of DCT vehicle is taken as a typical working condition, and 18 objective evaluation indicators under the power upshift working condition are studied and defined. The objective evaluation indicators are simplified by principal component analysis, their redundancy and blockiness are reduced, and the model input samples are optimized. The extreme gradient boosting tree model is trained to predict the subjective score of drivability, and the sparrow algorithm is used to optimize the core hyperparameters of the extreme gradient boosting tree to improve the accuracy and stability of the model. Road tests show that after the objective evaluation indicators are simplified by principal component analysis, the model evaluation accuracy reaches 97%, which is better than BPNN ( 90%), SVM ( 91%), ELM ( 92%) and SSA-XGBoost ( 95%). It is proved that the accuracy and stability of the proposed PCA-SSA-XGBoost model are better than other models, and it can complete the drivability evaluation more effectively. The evaluation model can be transferred and applied to other driving conditions, and has application value in solving the subjective and objective mapping problem in drivability evaluation.