Ask HN: Why don't people learning to drive use simulators?
It seems to me that people should spend their first few hours of driving lessons in a simulator, instead of on the road:
-Less scary for learners.
-Less inconvenient for other road users.
-Safer for everyone.
-Probably cheaper for the driving school in the long run.
-Lower carbon emissions.
But this doesn't seem to be a thing, in the UK at least. Why not? Surely it can't be that expensive to create a simple car simulator with steering wheel, gears and pedals. And the graphics could be pretty basic by modern game standards.
85 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadWhy don't we give kids go karts or 4 wheeler motorcycles before they learn to drive, anymore? I already had years of experience piloting powered vehicles from motorcycle size up to large excavators when it came time to get my driver's license.
It is not, they had those 40 years ago when I took my drivers ed. The one difference is those were driven from a film instead of a PC, so the upgraded models could be better (in that the PC image on screen could actually react to the student's inputs).
They also were an extremely poor substitute for actually driving a real physical car on the actual roads. As in they were only a 1% simulation. Someone could train on them for years and still not really know how to drive.
Unless the company building it invests Disney level money into building a full on simulator like some of the Disney park rides (significantly driving up the expense) the simulators will always be a poor substitute. And, even with a simulator, the student eventually has to graduate to a real physical car, whereupon all the issues with 'new drivers' again rear their ugly head.
And the "feel" on the steering wheel is also there.
Simulator for an A380? It's a bargain. For a Cessna 172, umm not so much.
When you're first learning to drive, think about how cautious you were when you put your car out of park for the first time. Chances are you barely touched the gas and inched forward while you discovered how much pressure it takes to accelerate or stop. You probably treated it like you were stepping foot on an alien world for the first time. A mode in your brain flipped that said "we're not screwing around here, this is actually happening".
I think simulators work for specialized things like flying because the stakes are high for tiny mistakes. If you flip the wrong switch or do something slightly wrong you might not only die but you'll also destroy potentially months or years of research and tens of millions of dollars.
Driving a car on the regular road has a different type of stakes. You can kill yourself and hundreds of others just by driving a few hundred feet in some places but the act of driving itself is much more forgiving for tiny mistakes.
You do something like go to an empty parking lot and figure out how they work before getting on the road.
In real life, I have license more than 20 years, but I still avoid some parts of city, because there people drive extremely nervous, I don't like to paint scratches after been there :)
yes, damned bowser...
... so let's have pilots use simulators, but not drivers?
While the accident wasn't my fault, since my car wasn't moving and I was rammed from the back, physical injuries still occurred, my instructor hurt him back, luckily I wasn't injured, but our car was no longer drivable. While the person that rammed me only said that they didn't see me and that such things happen.
From the point of view that your life is at probably greater risk, while learning to drive, I think the simulators could have a role in the learning process.
But I do 100% agree with you that simulation does not represent the experience of real life.
The tricky part is not hitting other cars, pedestrians and random stationery objects - this is where real-world experience is much better than any simulation because mistakes are physically painful, expensive and, in extreme circumstances, can end with jail time or death.
Being in an actual car in a safe, open, paved area such as an empty parking lot with an experienced driver coaching is the cheapest and most effective way to learn how to control a car. The amount of feedback that a driver gets by actually driving (forces, inertia, sensations through the pedals, steering wheel, etc.) would be difficult to recreate unless an expensive simulator is used.
Learning to drive with other drivers on the road takes practice that a simulator will have a difficult time to recreate.
This is the key to the question. When I first got in a driver’s seat, I immediately focused on the feedback from the wheel, spatially judging where the car was, all the things happening around me, and the paint on the lanes. It made me continually make these jerky micro corrections to stay in the lane.
About a minute in, the instructor notices this and says, “You’re doing what everyone does. You’re thinking too much. Look at a point down the road to where you want to go and your hands will take you there.” He basically told me to selectively ignore a lot of information from the situation and follow my instincts. It worked immediately.
Building a simulator to provide all that information would be awfully expensive.
Here a few links from a quick search:
http://thegooddrive.fr/fr/accueil.html
https://www.ecf.asso.fr/Les-plus-ECF/The-Good-Drive
https://www.ecf.asso.fr/Site-ECF-PRO/Blog/Simulateur-de-cond...
https://acreos.eu/en/home/
You can use DeepL to translate French to English.
That was the backwaters of Oklahoma.
If you want to make it easier to learn to drive, break the British fetish for manual.
As I know, this rule also works in some other countries, and slowly distributes. I think it's lobbied by insurance companies, because they pay lot of compensations for scratches, happen on parking, when people pass test in an automatic and then have difficulties in slow speed evolution's in manual.
It takes far longer to learn how to navigate traffic situations and maneuvers than to learn how to change gear. Driving standards in the UK are high and a single error when changing lanes or negotiating a junction can result in a test failure.
If it takes 10 hours of road driving to get comfortable and 2 hours to get comfortable with stick, you could do them both at the same time.
This was back in the late 90s in the Midwest of the US.
In reality, people learning to drive using simulators, but exist nuances.
Most important - costs. Typical numbers, are 10-20 hours of filming group, to just make cinema of 1 hour of learn process, and about 100 hours of gamedevs for 1 hour of cinema quality game.
In EU typical cost of full meter cinema, begins from 250k euro, median about 1mln.
These costs are too high to tolerate for low cost small machines (less than 100$ per hour), but for special purpose vehicles costs much higher, so they use simulations very active.
Special purpose vehicles, mean fireman, truck crane, tanks, other military machines.
- Life like behavior of small autos (smaller than semi-trucks) and human behavior, still programmed manually by humans.
In the US, Im pretty sure the typical path is that parents get their kids comfortable with the mechanical controls in parking lots and low traffic roads.
I've tried driving lessons in the US and they don't seem to include simulators. People actually follow traffic rules here and there are lots of quiet (low traffic) streets, so it's not as intimidating to be on the road.
Some countries accept extern (self-learn and just pass in certified), other not.
And regulations even more conservative than instructors.
I know, some time ago, long before war, in Russia people asked, why not use simulator to learn small plane flight. It takes few years, to gather group of learners with flight sim exp. Once this happen. Statistic said, typically in flight school, only 50% of students could fly from first try on real plane (others just fear, or get confused). Sim group fly 100%, only made small non-critical mistakes.
I learned to drive on a simulator, and it was very helpful. The simulator was a realistic-enough arcade game with force feedback, three pedals and a shifter, and a key to restart the engine when you stalled it.
I had little trouble driving once I got behind the wheel of a real car.
Nobody should be driving on a public road in traffic in the first few hours of learning to drive. They should start in a parking lot or some private road or closed circuit.
Driving simulators are probably not popular because cars are inexpensive and readily available, making simulation unnecessary.
You're not backing your argument with data showing that drivers who are learning are actually a safety problem or a frequent impediment to traffic.
The "Less scary" argument falls flat. All drivers should probably be more scared than they are. One of the main requirements in a simulator ought to be that it reproduces the same fear as the real thing.
Now I'm not sure of this is a UK or a West Europe only thing.
I don't think that we can simulate the mechanical feel of a manual car without spending so much money that you'd be better off just driving around a playground.
[1]: https://way.no/