Moving a car is not the same as knowing how to drive in traffic, and the first days behind the wheel are daunting. In this episode of Jugando en Serio (in Spanish), Javier Lara, marketing director at Autoescuela Lara, explains how a driving school with 50 years of history uses simulators to ease fear, train reflexes and raise awareness about alcohol and speed.
50 years of innovation in driver education
Autoescuela Lara turned 50 in October 2024. Javier Lara's parents founded it in Madrid's Puente de Vallecas district, and today, he says, it has 64 centers in Madrid, offering licenses that range from cars and motorcycles to trucks, buses and articulated vehicles.
Innovation goes back a long way: in the early 1990s they were, he says, the first driving school to install computers for students to take practice tests, when hardly anyone had internet at home. The next step was driving simulators.
What driving simulator training is for
Many people arrive afraid, and Lara insists that moving a car is not the same as driving among bikes, delivery vans, buses and distracted drivers staring at their GPS. The simulator, with three screens and the same pedals as a car, lets learners ease into that world with the instructor beside or behind them rather than in the passenger seat.
During a session, the instructor can trigger surprises from a keyboard: it starts raining, night falls, a pedestrian, a dog or a ball crosses the road. The goal is to train reflexes and get familiar with the clutch, “the great unknown friend”, while watching the traffic light and the car behind. At the end, learners see their results, graded with the same criteria a DGT examiner uses: speeding, forgotten indicators, collisions.
A city like Madrid is a jungle: you can't drive with two eyes, you need eight eyes, looking in every direction. Your vision has to be like a 360, without taking your eyes off the road ahead.
Feeling the risk: alcohol and rollover simulators
One of the most striking features simulates the effects of alcohol: it reproduces how you would drive after one, three or five drinks. You brake later than you think and your vision is impaired. With RACE, the Spanish automobile club, they ran courses including a reflex test: tapping lights as they switch on for one minute, first sober and then wearing goggles that simulate alcohol.
The rollover simulator turns the car through 360 degrees, “like a rotisserie chicken”, to show what happens at 120 or 140 km/h and how dangerous any loose object is, from a laptop to an umbrella. Because getting a car up to 120, Lara points out, is easy; the hard part is stopping dead when an animal or a person crosses in front of you.
That's when people realize how important it is not to drink and drive. It's incredibly powerful, because in the end that's what raising awareness is all about.
Less fear and reflexes already in place
The clearest effect, according to Lara, is breaking down the psychological barrier of fear, especially for learners around 40. Age matters: between someone aged 20 and someone aged 50 there can be a difference of 40 or 50 lessons, so comparing yourself with what friends or relatives say doesn't help. All the more so since, he jokes, almost everyone lies about how many lessons they took.
On-road instructors notice the difference: learners who come from the simulator have internalized many warnings and react better to the unexpected. And in the simulator you're on your own, which activates reflexes that sometimes switch off when you know the instructor has pedals too.
A 100% digital driver's license? Not yet
The simulator is already used as an exam in some civil service selection processes with a practical test, such as those for official government drivers: everyone faces equivalent situations and the test is more objective than on the street. Even so, Lara thinks it's too early for a fully digital license: those candidates already know how to drive, and learning requires a professional alongside you and real streets.
His to-do list: more road safety education from an early age, bringing deaths down to zero and, he predicts, a 0.0 alcohol limit within five or six years. And a warning for any trainer: opening the book at page 20 and reading it aloud no longer works. You have to teach with examples, games and interactive dynamics, because today's learners live in a world of immediacy.
