Can you learn to drive with a simulator?
Kinda.
I recently passed my driving test.1 I learned to drive, in part, with a driving simulator.
Before I tried this, I looked online for other peoples’ experiences. I found many people asking whether it was a good idea, but few answers from those who’d tried it. Most replies speculated that learning to drive on a sim was a bad idea because sim driving isn’t the same as real driving. (True but unhelpful: sim driving only needs to be sufficiently similar to real driving to speed up the process.) Another common reply was that practicing on a sim could engrain bad habits. (Also true for me, but those habits were easily overcome.) Given the paucity of first-hand accounts, then, I decided to write up my experience here.
This was my setup:
I’d never attempted to drive a real car before my first real driving lesson, but I had done about 25 hours of simulated practice. The upshot: without any specific instruction, I could functionally drive. I could steer, use the pedals, and shift gears.2 I avoided common rookie errors like wildly misjudging the size of the car, frequent stalling, and significant over/under steering. It works.
The simulator did have a few flaws relative to real driving lessons:
Physical feedback. There’s no physical feedback for the clutch bite point (a downside mentioned by a driving instructor on Youtube). So while I stalled less than average (perhaps three times in my first six hours of real driving), I still wasn’t especially smooth when moving off in first gear.
Field of view. The sim has a very limited field of view, and clunky controls for turning your virtual head. Proper observations are crucial to safe driving, especially when reversing. I tended not to bother much with this in the sim as it was just too cumbersome/ineffective. So I was as much a novice as anyone when it came to remembering always to check mirrors. (This would be solved with a VR headset, but that seemed too expensive at the time. In hindsight it may have been worth it.)
Weird idiosyncrasies. My sim setup had absurdly stiff brakes. They did seem too stiff, but having never driven a real car, I simply got used to it. For 25 hours. As it turns out, they were far too stiff. In my first real lesson I ended up slamming down the brakes far too harshly. It took about 5 hours of real driving to iron out that habit. (It turned out that overly stiff brake pedals are an issue with my specific hardware, so I adjusted the settings to be far closer to real braking.)3
For those trying to learn this way, then, I’d first try out a real car at least once before doing a lot of sim practice, so that you can calibrate your setup to feel realistic. But otherwise I think that using a sim can be an effective way to learn to drive.
Indeed, learning on a sim has some advantages over real driving:
Learning from failure and pushing boundaries. We often learn more from failure than success. If you want to know how fast you can safely take a corner, then it would be handy to keep on trying it at faster speeds until you crash. That way you get a feel for the limit points. (Imagine learning to ride a bike without ever being permitted to put your feet down!) And while crashing is very costly in the real world, it is costless in a sim. (I’ve read anecdotes of sim racing enthusiasts controlling real-world car slides using their sim racing muscle memory.)
Visualising the vehicle. New drivers often struggle to visualise the exterior of their vehicle, so much so that instructors often place visual aids in the car to demonstrate its width. On a sim you can get a bird’s eye view of the car with a button press, for instant visual feedback.
Price and convenience. Real driving lessons are expensive and instructors have limited availability. Sim practice is free (after buying the gear) and available at all times.
For most people I expect that saving money on instruction would be the main draw. So let’s focus on that.
Are driving simulators expensive?
Not really. I paid £215 for my setup: the steering wheel and pedals were £180 (the Logitech G920), the gear shifter was £30 (also Logitech), and the simulator software (City Car Driving) was £5. I’ve added the details in this footnote: 4.
You also need a computer, but nothing fancy. And if you sell the gear afterwards, this brings down the cost to virtually nothing. (Second-hand prices are oddly high.)
How many lessons would the sim have to replace in order to break even on price?
The RAC claim that the average cost of driving lessons in the UK is £30 per hour (as of 2023). If you paid £300 for your setup, then using the sim will break even if it saves you 10 hours of lessons.
That’s an average. I paid £40 per hour for lessons (Cambridge is expensive), and only £215 for my gear, meaning my break-even point was just 5 hours. And if I sold the gear for £135 (easy enough), then the break-even would hit at just 2 hours saved.
How many lessons did you save?
The RAC estimate that to pass the test, the average driver takes 45 hours of lessons, plus 22 hours of additional practice, for a total of 67 hours.
I passed after 35 hours of lessons, and perhaps 15 hours of additional practice. (And I was test-ready somewhat before this.)
If we naïvely assume that I would have taken the average time absent the sim, and credit the sim with the total reduction, then it saved me about 17 hours of real-world driving. This easily outstrips the break-even point in terms of price.5
How much can we credit the sim for your purported speedup?
This depends on how long I’d have taken without it. I might be expected to learn slower than average, as I’m older than the average learner. Or I might be expected to learn quicker, as I already have a lot of road experience on bikes.6 I’d guess that it saved me at least 5 hours, and probably 10+ hours, of lessons.
If you’re worried about the cost of lessons, why not just learn with parents?
That wasn’t a viable option for me. But even for those with parents/partners/friends living nearby and willing to teach, that approach has costs. The instructor’s time has value (which you cannot legally recompense unless they’re a professional), plus they’ll need extra insurance. It also isn’t ideal for novice drivers to be out on public roads before grasping the basics. Using a simulator takes away a lot of the risk from learning without a professional instructor.
(Plus kids can learn on a sim even before they’re old enough to get a provisional licence.)
What software did you use?
I used City Car Driving. To my knowledge this is only software which actually attempts to teach you how to drive. (There are plenty of other driving sims available, but they focus on racing or driving trucks or tractors or whatever.)
CCD is not a great simulator. It was made by a small Russian studio on a small budget. It looks and sounds basic. It doesn’t have British road signage or laws: in order to practice driving on the left, you have to select an ‘Australia’ profile (and ‘Australia’ looks suspiciously similar to Russia).
You can learn the basics via the career mode, or else just drive freely around various maps. The career mode is a sensible place to start. It is not without flaws. There are several lessons where driving more than a few miles over the speed limit is an instant fail. (The first signed speed limit you come across is for 60, but that is a lie: the actual speed limit is 50, and if you go 53 you will instantly fail.) You will instantly fail if you drive through a red light. You will also instantly fail if you drive through an amber light, even if it changed from green to amber 0.1s before you drove over the stop line at 45kmph. Roundabouts are anarchic scrums. I don’t know whether this is a realistic portrayal of Australia/Russia, but you seem to enter at will and exit by cutting across several lanes of traffic. CCD is useful for learning the mechanics of driving, not for simulating British roads.
Nonetheless, the results: when I started, I had never sat in the driver’s seat of a car, nor used any car controls. After 5 hours I could use the main car controls, including manual gear shifting, to a reasonable standard. After 7 hours I could complete a test circuit involving a slalom, U-turn, reverse parking, parallel parking, and a hill start. After 10 hours I completed a 25-minute city ride without any penalties. By then I could drive a (simulated) car. After 20 hours I had completed the career mode. And, as I mentioned above, this translated into being able to drive a real car. (Not well, mind you, but functionally!)
CCD is far from perfect. Pretty much any big driving game studio could probably make a better learn-to-drive sim. But they haven’t. In our world, the only ones who tried were a small band of under-resourced Russians. Hats off to them. (A sequel is due next year!)
Any other sims worth mentioning?
I also tried Assetto Corsa, a racing simulator. It doesn’t attempt to teach you how to drive. Nonetheless, it has more realistic vehicle physics, real licensed cars, and prettier visuals than CCD. I used it to get used to car handling and gear shifting, and to practice higher-speed manoeuvres. (Setting everything to the maximum realism settings.)
Above I mentioned anecdotes of people avoiding real-life crashes by using their sim racing muscle memory. This seems like a plausible use case for racing sims as a supplement to driving lessons, given that high-speed manoeuvres form no part of regular driving training. (Contrast motorcycling, where 50+kmph avoidance swerving is a mandatory element of the test.)
Given that my aim was merely to learn to drive normally, however, I didn’t spend too long with Assetto Corsa. After instantly failing a task for unclear reasons for the nth time in City Car Driving, I sometimes relaxed by booting it up and blasting a Fiat 500 in a straight line down a racing track and then crashing at the first bend.
…any other sims?
Oh yeah, also Euro Truck Simulator 2, which is apparently the most popular driving simulator out there.7 (When I wrote this it was getting 46,000 players at any given moment, versus 15,000 for Assetto Corsa or a few hundred for City Car Driving.)
As the name subtly hints, Euro Truck Simulator 2 simulates driving a truck in Europe. I assume that lorries drive quite differently from cars (did you know they have 12+ gears?), and so I didn’t spend much time on ETS2. Nonetheless, it involves the same basic controls as a car (steer, accelerate, brake, clutch, shift) so it might have helped a bit.
My takeaways:
Driving simulators can substitute for some driving lesson. They’re not perfect, but they are good enough, and even have some advantages over real driving.
Ideally you should try real driving before spending a lot of time practicing on a sim, in order to calibrate the controls and avoid weird habits.
A reasonable sim setup will pay for itself if it saves you between 2 and 10 hours of lessons. Beyond that it saves you money. This feels eminently achievable.
No, I’m not a teenager. When I was 17 I predicted that by the time I could afford a car (in perhaps 6 years’ time), self-driving cars would exist and there would be no point. Even with hindsight I don’t think this was too outrageous to extrapolate from the mildly successful DARPA Grand Challenges. Even smart well-calibrated people have been over-optimistic on self-driving car progress, and in 2023 it does exist in some places, and is generally pretty safe. Predicting when the future will arrive, is, if anything, more tricky than predicting what it will look like.
For any American readers: the UK default is to learn manual (‘stick shift’).
The G920 pedals have small plastic inserts to prevent the brake pedal being easily depressed, intended to simulate hydraulic braking. Some people online suggested removing the plastic inserts, but I fixed it more easily via software calibration.
You’ll need (1) hardware, (2) software, and a (3) a computer.
Driving sim hardware (wheel, pedals, gear shifter): £10 to £300+
I have the Logitech G920 wheel and pedals and Logitech gear shifter, the RRP for which is usually £300. This setup works perfectly well. You can minus c. £40 for the gear shifter if you only want to learn automatic. I paid £210 for both by using tools like camelcamelcamel (to price-watch Amazon) and sites like HotUKDeals (which lists deals.)
You can spend far more on premium equipment, but the Logitech will do fine. It’s a well-known brand with a good price/performance ratio.
Driving sim software: £5 to £20+
City Car Driving has an RRP of £20.51 in the UK, but Steam periodically offers very steep discounts. You can find historical pricing data at SteamDB. I paid £4.71.
You could supplement this with titles such as Assetto Corsa (RRP £15.49/low £3.09), Euro Truck Simulator 2 (£16.49/£2.24), or BeamNG.drive (£19.49/£12.72).
Lower prices are also possible in different regions, or via grey market sites like CDKeys.
A computer capable of running the software: free to £400+
None of the sims mentioned above are graphically demanding, and should run on quite old computer hardware. You probably already have something suitable.
I ran City Car Driving on the integrated graphics of a Ryzen 5 5600G at good settings and a fast framerate (despite integrated graphics not being officially supported). The PC cost around £400 in 2022, and an adequate monitor can be had for £100. (Bigger is better for realism; I have a basic 32” 1440p monitor which cost £120.)
VR would probably be a big improvement, but you’re looking at £300 for the headset, and a PC with sufficient grunt to run it would cost closer to £1000.
It wouldn’t break even with time - recall that I spent 25 hours on the sim prior to my first lesson (and more afterwards). But if you think of sim driving as a substitute for solo leisure activities (eg reading, watching TV, playing games) then it works out okay. (I did find it oddly compelling.)
I’ve ridden bicycles for almost 20 years, and a small motorcycle for about 3 years.
ETS2’s popularity is likely to be partly attributable to the fact that it attempts to be an actual game, with tasks, upgrades to abilities, etc, rather than just an educational sim. It is oddly relaxing to take a payload of logs from Birmingham to Calais on a dark rainy night as the radio pumps out 80’s prog rock.