5 Of The Most Realistic Manual Driving Simulators

Fans of “The Big Bang Theory” know that Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) is good at many things, but driving isn’t one of them. Having spent his teenage years probing the secrets of the universe and earning advanced degrees, learning to drive took a back seat. Then, in season two’s fifth episode, “The Euclid Alternative,” Sheldon’s usual ride falls through, and he’s forced to use his superior intellect to learn to join the rest of us on the road.

Rather than hitting the mean streets of Pasadena, Sheldon’s friend and engineer Howard (Simon Helberg) sets him up with SimuRide, a cutting-edge driving simulator “borrowed” from the U.S. military. Despite its fictional use, SimuRide is a real piece of tech used to train soldiers to operate military vehicles in a non-threatening artificial environment, among other uses.

SimuRide has a high sticker price (approximately $10,000), and it’s the sort of thing you’re likely to encounter only in a professional setting. Fortunately, there are more accessible driving simulators on the market that offer a similar experience. With a steering wheel, a set of pedals, and a shifter, some of them purport to be realistic enough to learn to drive with, while others use verisimilitude to ramp up the fun. Whether your driving goals are virtual or IRL, these are some of the most realistic manual driving simulators you can play right now.

“City Car Driving” is designed to teach a person the basics of driving in the real world. The simulator’s description states that it “will help you master the basic skill of car driving in various traffic conditions, with plunging into the environment most closely resembling the real one.”

The YouTube channel Conquer Driving tested the simulator and found it compatible with various peripherals, including a gaming controller, a steering wheel, shifter, and pedal setup, a regular monitor, and many popular VR goggles. You can change your POV, but first-person is preferred for a realistic experience. It incorporates features like stalling if you let off the clutch without pressing the gas when driving in manual and stuttering if you try to start it without pressing in the clutch. You can also customize features such as traffic levels and pedestrian counts.

It does have some limitations, like not automatically canceling the turn signal after you’ve completed a turn and, if you’re not using VR goggles, you have to manually press a button to look side to side, but those are relatively minor gripes. The biggest limitation is that you don’t feel the pressure of actual pedals. While simulators can help you learn the mechanics of driving, learning to drive is a lot about understanding the feel of a car – how hard to press on the brake and how quickly to let off the clutch while shifting gears – which isn’t reliably simulated.

“BeamNG” is a popular sandbox driving and racing simulator (currently ranked #13 on Steam’s all-time most popular game list) which blends the real with the surreal in a highly customizable driving experience. The YouTube channel Car Pal has amassed more than 1.6 million subscribers and over 500 “BeamNG” videos of cars doing everything from running deadly soapbox race courses to playing antigravity tag.

BeamNG is so popular in large part because of the simulated crashes, which are admittedly dramatic, if not always totally accurate. For a simulator to accurately recreate what might happen in a simulated accident, it needs a whole bunch of complex information. Calculating overall force is simply mass times acceleration, but understanding how that force will be transmitted through an object is much more complicated. You need to know details such as what each component is made of, how it’s reinforced, how it’s connected to other components, the precise angle of impact, and more. Any variance could play out wildly in the chaotic destruction of a crash. That said, BeamNG’s soft body physics can be pretty accurate under the right conditions, as demonstrated by side-by-side comparisons with the game and real-life crash tests.

In addition to crashing cars from a god-like perspective, you can put yourself in the driver’s seat, turn off any driving assistance, and set up manual shifting to work with pedals, a shifter, and steering wheel peripherals to create a relatively realistic manual driving experience.

If your only virtual driving experience is games like “Mario Kart” or even games like “Forza” and “Need for Speed,” then this might be a bit of a culture shock, but if you want to really sink your teeth into simulated driving, “Assetto Corsa” is worth considering. It’s compatible with a mouse and keyboard, VR headsets, steering wheels, shifters, pedals, and various other gaming peripherals.

Because of its steep learning curve and an official vehicle and track lineup that leaves a little something to be desired, some reviewers gave “Assetto Corsa” lackluster marks as a racing game while praising it as a driving simulator. The game incorporates laser scanning to create vehicle models and tracks, making them as detailed and realistic as possible. Each car has its own unique characteristics, which makes driving them feel different, and mastery of one car doesn’t necessarily equate to mastery over another. In that way, it mirrors the real-life experience of borrowing a friend’s car or driving a rental and suddenly feeling a little uncomfortable behind the wheel.

Once you’ve chosen a vehicle, you can take it out on realistic recreations of real-world race tracks. Then, between races, you have to maintain your car by adjusting tire pressure, suspension, brakes, and other components. While the base game might be a little bare-bones, it’s supported by a community of modders who add new vehicles and tracks on a regular basis, even more than a decade after the game’s release.

Even more popular among Steam gamers than “BeamNG,” “Euro Truck Simulator 2” won two awards at the first-ever Steam Awards, and it currently ranks fifth on Steam’s all-time most popular games list. It’s beloved because it offers realistic driving, good-looking big rigs, and beautiful European landscapes to drive them on.

The gameplay is relatively simple. You drive a truck to transport cargo across a compressed version of Europe. If you want to just drive, you can just drive, or you can jump into the narrative and level up your long-road bona fides. You’ll start as a hired courier, then buy your own truck, and finally build your own trucking yard. Then you can hire additional drivers, upgrade your trucks, and more.

The landscapes and cities aren’t totally accurate. You’ll see the occasional landmark, but don’t expect to drive past your pen pal’s childhood home. That said, the driving experience is realistic enough that scientists have used the game to study driver fatigue in a safe laboratory setting. Participants were asked to play the game for extended periods throughout the day to replicate the fatigue from long driving stretches. The hope is to develop a way to detect the moment a driver becomes dangerously tired and to create an alert system to help prevent accidents. In the meantime, ordinary people can use the game to simulate driving for educational or recreational purposes.

Paul Coleman, the chief designer of the first “DiRT Rally” game, is a rally co-driver when he’s not making games, and that firsthand knowledge of the sport inevitably and intentionally bled into the gameplay, delivering a game that is challenging and realistic.

“DiRT Rally 2.0” ups the ante with a few more years of technological advancement, not to mention some new cars. For “DiRT Rally 2.0,” Coleman handed the proverbial wheel to chief designer Ross Gowing, who worked with actual rally drivers Jon Armstrong and Ryan Champion to make the driving experience as realistic as possible. The inputs are sensitive, so you really have to pay attention to the track and think about what you’re doing. In addition to each car driving differently from one another, individual cars behave differently depending on the track surface and driving conditions, just like in real life. If you mess up too badly, you will crash, and damage to your car impacts your ability to drive and win races. Fortunately, you’ll have opportunities to fix your car during service periods.

For the uninitiated, the learning curve can be pretty steep, with players lovingly referring to the “DiRT Rally” games as the “Dark Souls” of rally racing games. If you’re looking for a casual racing game you can throw on every now and again, this probably isn’t it. But if you want something you can really sink your tires into, “DiRT Rally 2.0” has plenty to offer.