Ask HN: Why don't people learning to drive use simulators? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why don't people learning to drive use simulators?

19 pointshermitcrab84 comments

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.

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In a virtualized world there's no consequences. It sounds counter-intuitive but I think that would be worse off because something in the virtualized environment might give you false confidence in the real world and that has serious implications for not just yourself but others.

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.

Completely agree with this; it should not be experienced as a videogame, it should be experienced as a real responsibility as in, "This is what I'm 100% focused on because it's the most important thing I'm doing right now."

I was shocked at how similar real world driving was to SuperMario Cart. I find it illogical to assume adding the stress of real dangers, on top of learning basic motor controls and car physics is somehow better for all parties.

Ideally you dont learn basic motor controls in real dangerous situation.

You do something like go to an empty parking lot and figure out how they work before getting on the road.

In SuperMario Cart also exist toxic drivers?

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 :)

> In SuperMario Cart also exist toxic drivers?

yes, damned bowser...

Wow! Games each day closer to reality, but I'm not sure, this will make me more happy :)

Is there any evidence to back this up?

I didn't check. I have an "I think" in there because it was my personal opinion after spending a few minutes thinking about it after reading the title of this Ask HN thread. It was interesting because it made me think "that's true, why don't we have them?" so I replied.

It's a fair hypothesis, just wondering if there was research analyzing it.

I am only suggesting the first few hours are in a simulator. Just enough to get basic familiarity with the controls, road positioning etc. Certainly I don't think this would make the young me overconfident on their first real driving session.

What if we use VR goggles? Egregiously bad behavior is punished by inducing nausea and motion sickness.

> In a virtualized world there's no consequences.

... so let's have pilots use simulators, but not drivers?

I think the pilots focus on simulators to manage controls not learn to fly per se. I know there's a lot of overlap in the concepts, but it can be as simple as: flying is more complicated so you have to add extra steps to deal with situations appropriately.

I don't think there really a right answer because I had a car accident while I was still learning and driving with the instructor.

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.

> Surely it can't be that expensive to create a simple car simulator with steering wheel, gears and pedals.

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.

All the Gran Turismo's I've played had different cars that felt and drove differently. There's F1-level simulators, but the consumer video game ones are actually also very good.

A driving simulator will set you back around $150K. There are several vendors in the space. This will include a "cab" with steering wheel, brakes, etc. and a projected display system. Some go 200+ degrees FOV.

And the "feel" on the steering wheel is also there.

And a real car can be had for approximately 1-10% of that. I think we've found the answer.

The same issue comes up when trying to sell (high fidelity) aircraft simulators for general aviation aircraft.

Simulator for an A380? It's a bargain. For a Cessna 172, umm not so much.

Simulators in driving schools are a thing since a long time in France.

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.

We had simulators in our class when I was taking Drivers Education back in 1982.

That was the backwaters of Oklahoma.

Looks like a video game, and not effective at all

My dad did (well, I'm pretty sure he already knew how to drive and just used them as part of the training course to get his license). One big reason they aren't great: missing accurate force feedback. Driving is rather intuitive once you gain familiarity due to being able to feel the road and the movement of the car through your hands, feet, and seat. It's way too hard to simulate.

> Driving is rather intuitive once you gain familiarity due to being able to feel the road and the movement of the car through your hands, feet, and seat

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.

The "Driver's Ed" class I had in the 80s had simulators; controls in front of a TV screen. Not interactive but there was some "scoring system" where the teacher could see some of what you were doing with your controls and if it was inappropriate for that stage in the movie.

Why 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 seems to me that people should spend their first few hours of driving lessons in a simulator, instead of on the road

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.

In Denmark, you learn basic control of the car in a closed circuit, there you learn how to work gears, clutch, brakes, blinkers, steering, and then you practice by driving some patterns and have brake-tests, including on a slippery track (artificial ice). I feel this gives you the best from both worlds.. It's a very safe environment, and the first time, you'll have the driving instructor in the car with you, and he has a pair of pedals too, so he can break and kill the engine before anything bad happens. One of the things simulators suck at, are g-forces, like, what does it FEEL being in the drivers seat, hands on steering wheel when taking a turn.. And I also agree with nickjj, that it is probably best to do it in an environment with consequences, as not to build up unwarranted over-confidence.

Also, I find it disturbing that it is legal to learn how to drive with automatic transmission.. If you're not able to learn how to drive a car with gears, that is, you can't muster the hand-eye coordination and basic motorskill to get a feel for this simple operation, I'd expect you to be equally clumsy with steering, blinkers and brakes and that makes you're unfit to commandeer any motorized hunk of steel down any road in my book.

>...only 1.3% of new vehicles are sold in the U.S. with a stick, down from 3.4% in 2010.

https://www.cars.com/articles/why-manual-transmissions-are-d...

And most of those aren't even real sticks (auto rev matching, no lift shift, etc).

I've always considered that weird, given most cars in Europe aren't automatic. Not sure what the exact stats are. Idiocracy?

The only time I've had an accident was in Canada, because I wasn't used to using an automatic and went forward unexpectedly. It's just what you're used to.

Amusingly we got told off in California for "not knowing how to use our gears". As we hadn't put the auto into the low setting on a switchback. I did learn the benefit of that several years before when I burnt out my brakes the 1st time I drove in the alps and just wasn't used to the sustained descents.

I agree that closed circuit is the best answer.

In my opinion, the coordination is not an issue. Most of the accidents and near accidents I've seen are due to poor decisions, inattention (which is usually a poor decision), and not understanding vehicle dynamics.

I’m sure in a few decades people won’t even need to drive. Let alone know stick.

The best way is to learn by doing.

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.

The country where I learned to drive (30 years ago now, but the process is still the same) has a very different system from the one common in the UK or US. You don't get a provisional driver license, and you are only allowed to drive once you pass the driving test.

The actual driving school consists of separate theory and practice courses, and you have to pass the test of the former before even starting the latter. The first few hours of practical driving can happen in a simulator, for the schools that can afford one; but most commonly they happen on specially designed training tracks - essentially empty parking lots with drawn ilnes to represent streets and intersections. You only get to drive in actual traffic once you have some experience in a safe environment.

The Norwegian startup "Way" does this [1]. They have built an in-house simulation stack where you sit in a real car that you drive inside a simulation which is projected around you, while different metrics are extracted while you learn in different scenarios. They offer a complete driving education track where they use the simulator as much as possible.

[1]: https://way.no/

That looks impressive. Something cheaper would probably still be quite effective though.

This looks like the only possibly viable simulator, at least what's been linked in the comments

I did. I made lego cars and tractor trailers with the steering wheal on the roof and drove those around hand drawn tracks. When I finally got behind a wheel, the tricky part was learning the nuances and coordination but the theory was already there.

Most kids playing video games like GTA IV having been driving cars on streets for years before they are old enough to actually drive.

I learned to drive from GTA III (before I had my license). I'm convinced the reflexes developed playing that game saved me from what could have been a bad accident in real life.

I was driving on an interstate and traffic went from wide open (70 mph) to stopped. The end of the line of stopped cars was just over the crest of an overpass (so I couldn't see), and I was in a compact car (lower to the ground, and I'm short, so doubly couldn't see the stopped vehicles over the crest of the overpass).

With no time to stop, and almost no time to react, I instinctively avoided the stopped car and S-turned onto the shoulder, which gave me stopping distance. I don't think I could have reacted this quickly without video game-reflexes. The pickup truck that had been behind me locked up his brakes and screeched to a halt occupying the space my car would have been, if I had even been able to stop.

Side note, this is also why it REALLY annoys me to see impatient drivers in traffic jams dipping out onto the shoulder to "have a look." In fact in the event I described I only barely stopped behind someone else who had gone onto the shoulder. In that case I don't know whether that person went onto the shoulder after traffic slowed, or if like me they'd barely avoided hitting the line of stopped cars.

I had some similar ideas, but with one major difference.

One of the most dangerous aspects of driving is the sense of complacency. You've driven down this road 100 times before in worse weather, what's the worse that can happen?

Why not have simulator training for rare/unexpected circumstance - kids running onto the road from behind parked cars, fog, snow and ice, a sudden puncture at highway speeds, large animals on the road at night etc. Facing such situations in a simulator could help both novice and experienced prepare for these events and serve as a reminder that driving, despite being mundane, is a dangerous activity.

You can even have the trainees perform everyday tasks in the simulator like answering a phone call while driving, fiddling with the radio or navigation, or trying to read the text on some sign. That way, drivers can experience the danger associated with losing focus.

We had driving simulators in the mid 1980s when I took driver's ed and they were original to my high school which was built in the late 1960s.

Our school also had a driving track behind it where we would practice driving before being allowed on the road. The radios in the cars were tuned to a particular station and our instructor could broadcast instructions through the radio. The quality of that system was so poor that no one could understand which car he was giving directions to or what the directions were. This ultimately led to him beating on the hood of the car with a hard piece of rubber while screaming because you didn't follow some direction that was impossible to understand. Good times.

My daughter is currently taking drivers ed at her high school and they only teach what is required to pass the written test. All on the road instruction has to be done through private driving schools.

Familiarity with the controls can be learned easily on a low traffic road or a terrain/parking lot. But what I found most people lack is spatial awareness. And I don’t think simulators are a great way to teach it.

This may sound like a joke, but two of my kids (~12 yo) learned most of their driving skills[1] from GTA 5.

It was a relatively easy transition from GTA 5 to a real automobile for them.

1. My kids mostly play GTA 5 by driving around the island, staying in their lanes, obeying signals, running mundane errands, etc. They're more interested in the variety of vehicles and the terrain than going around shooting people.

Sidenote: I wish GTA 5 had a mode without violence and cussing for younger kids. It is a wondrous game with educational value, in many respects. Get it done, Rockstar Games!

Other important thing are regulations, which require learn amount of hours on certified vehicle with instructor.

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.

Where you get this info?

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.

Technologies really grow recently, but this mostly affected static objects (buildings, interior things), or slow motion objects, like big ships or large planes on parking.

- Life like behavior of small autos (smaller than semi-trucks) and human behavior, still programmed manually by humans.

Simulators for driver's ed have been around for a long time - the question here may be why you didn't use one. I learned to drive on a simulator in the Midwestern US in the '80s, and they've been around since the '60s in the UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmCk63f9So4

Does anyone in the UK learn on a simulator now? I'm not aware of such a thing now or when I learned to drive in the 80s.

I took a drivers ed class where we had a steering wheel contoller and pedals hooked up to a computer. It was essentially a really boring version of Cruisin' USA where we had to go from point A to B while staying in the lines and stopping at stop signs. We eventually did get to pilot a real car after several weeks.

This was back in the late 90s in the Midwest of the US.

In China learning to drive with simulators is becoming more popular. I believe they have to complete some actual driving as well to complete their license.

The problem is that there are some that have gotten their license just to travel abroad and rent a car, and the rental car becomes their first real experience behind the wheel.

My driving lessons (in India) did include a few hours in an arcade-style simulator before we went on the road.

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.

I have been to India and found the traffic terrifying. I can't imagine what it must be like to learn in a big Indian city!

It was pretty scary. I would slow down when people or animals were in the path of the car, but my driving instructor didn't like that. He insisted that I should go full speed ahead and trust that anyone in my path would get out of the way.

Why use the brakes when you have a horn. ;0)

The difficult part of learning to drive a car in the UK is mastering clutch control and changing gears whilst doing proper observations.

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.

It's a great idea.

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.

I’m for it, but for adults too. Something’s got to push back against the road rage stuff. Plus there’s got to be a way to tell someone their ability to drive safely is questionable. It’s a skill that dies out over time with age. Seen too much tragedy on the road.

I do not think it is too helpful. The most important part about driving is the part which happens intuitively. Knowing how it feels when you accelerate, turn and break has to come before any other skill actually can be relevant.

We used to. https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/1980s-doron-drivers-e...

What percent of drivers in the UK go to a drivers school that might have such a device?

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.

Having a near fatal miss during drivers ed, I'd love it if my kids didn't have to do IRL training. (Mine was through a school program and the student driving tried to merge into a semi-truck's front end.)

Sounds like that merge conflict would suck to resolve.

Some countries have an option to do part of the learning in simulator, for example in Finland.

But the simulators absolutely suck and in no way represent real driving. The feel is just not the same

Where I live in West Europe, we do use simulators?

Now I'm not sure of this is a UK or a West Europe only thing.

Driving a car is quite easy and something most people could learn in a couple of hours.

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.

For better or worse I learned to drive on Gran Turismo

How about Carmageddon? :)

That's what I did. Tons of Gran turismo and GTA.

Don't think that would be great preparation for driving on the roads. Especially in a manual (gear shift) car. ;0)

Judging by the standard level of driving on UK roads, I think most people did the same.

Daytona USA prepared me for driving in traffic, in some ways.

Currently, manual cars still account for 70 per cent of the 31.7 million cars on UK's roads.

If you want to make it easier to learn to drive, break the British fetish for manual.

So, a learning driver or driving school has only around 10 million cars to choose from with an automatic?

Those 10million cars are no more available to those drivers than the one in your driveway.

A driving school merely needs to buy the ones that are suitable for their students and can do so from among all the cars. Whether 20M other cars have what is, in your opinion, an unsuitable transmission for driver training doesn't seem limiting.

In UK, if you pass your test in an automatic then you are restricted to only being able to drive automatic cars. Historically this reduces demand for automatics, and they are more expensive in UK, dealers charge more for an automatic gearbox. Even when renting a car, automatics cost more (probably just to extract more cash from tourists)

Precisely my point. Holding on to the antiquated manual transmission makes the easier form of driving more expensive.

> In UK, if you pass your test in an automatic then you are restricted to only being able to drive automatic car

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.

Except for a small percentage of the population who have coordination problems or find driving extremely stressful, operating a gearbox is not something which extends the length of driver training.

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.

Hm. Not sure how it could be the case that not learning something takes the same amount of time as learning something. Can you think of any more examples of this? It would be great if I could learn those things; even if never have a use for it, it’s literally free.

Concurrent learning is the answer that you are looking for. Many activities take a certain amount of time but not 100% constant focus.

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.

I prefer an automatic. My wife prefers a manual. Why mandate one or the other? Anyway, all electric cars will be automatic.

Automatic transmission still have much higher fuel consumption, and much less responsible on non-expensive machines, this why Europe use it so much.

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