In order to improve the problems of poor trajectory specification, unsecured safety, and unsmooth paths planned by the artificial potential field method (APF) in the high-speed overtaking state of intelligent vehicles. By designing the lane-changing gravitational potential field used to guide the smart vehicle to change lanes in order to ensure the normality of the lane-changing trajectory; constructing an obstacle vehicle repulsive potential field with an anisotropic distribution structure to improve the safety of lane changing; and establish the road centerline repulsive potential field with steering notch and design the smoothing cost function to optimize the planned trajectory points to make the planned path smoother. Design of path tracking controller based on linear quadratic regulator (LQR) to track the planned path. Through the joint simulation of Simulink and Carsim, the results show that the improved APF algorithm can plan a more reasonable path, and the tracking error of the designed LQR path tracking controller tends to be close to zero, which can better control the vehicle to complete the overtaking lane change.