Let me start with a confession, and I want to be clear about what I'm confessing to.
I have spent the better part of my career conducting police driver training almost exclusively on public roads, in live traffic, in real cruisers. Somewhere around 90 to 95 percent of everything I've delivered has been out there in the world, not in a controlled environment. That's my lens, and I think you deserve to know it before I share what follows. It shapes how I see this technology — it always has.
But here's what I'm not confessing to: I have never hated simulators. I've never dismissed them outright. What I've believed, consistently, is that they are a tool — a specific tool, with a specific lane — and that the problems arise when we mistake the tool for the solution.
Twenty-five plus years of experience and one recent visit later, I still believe that. Let me tell you why.
2006: The First Look
Back in 2006, my organization ran a pilot project with a driver training company that was just breaking into the law enforcement market. They had three simulators and real ambition. We brought over 80 officers through across five or six weeks — classes of six, a bit of theory, then onto the simulators.
What emerged almost immediately was Simulator Acquired Syndrome — SAS. The inner ear and the eyes were in conflict. Without a motion platform, the body had no physical reference to match what it was seeing on screen, and the physiology started pushing back. Officers were getting sick.
What we also learned very quickly was that the instructor was everything. Two of our three instructors were disciplined — slow speed, straight lines, short sessions on the simulator, breaks to observe, gradual progression back in. The third mentioned it once or twice and moved on. Of all the students who experienced SAS across the entire pilot, 80 percent of them were attributed to that one instructor. Same simulator, same room, completely different outcomes. Two officers got so sick we had to drive them home ourselves.
I was involved in that project beyond just observation — I worked with that company on developing their training approach and helped with their marketing as well. So, I had a close look at what the technology could and couldn't do at that stage of its development. The graphics were rough, the force feedback was inconsistent, the feel through the wheel and pedals had little relationship to a real vehicle. I had spent years prior working with advanced drivers on a skid pad five days a week, and there was simply no comparison between what the simulator offered and what the skid pad gave you.
At the time, the conclusion was straightforward: for pure driving skill development, the technology wasn't there. We had a skid pad. We had roads. We haven't had a training incident on the road in over 25 years. The case for simulators as a driving development tool was very hard to make.
But even then, I didn't walk away thinking simulators were useless. I walked away thinking they were a tool being asked to do a job they weren't built for.
2026: Twenty Years Later
Fast forward to this year. New leadership, renewed interest, a fresh look at the technology. The pitch was familiar — better graphics, more throughput, safer training environment. One thing had genuinely changed: this system had a motion platform. Back in 2006 we had theorized that the absence of motion was a primary driver of SAS — the inner ear had nothing to work with. So this felt like a meaningful upgrade worth testing.
My honest first impression when I sat down in front of the screens: the graphics looked almost identical to what I remembered from 2006. The pedestrians still moved in that slightly mechanical way. The vehicles on screen weren't fluid. I kept thinking that the people building video games have solved this problem — Grand Theft Auto looks nothing like this — and yet driver training simulators haven't caught up. That surprised me.
I also made a mistake I should have known better than to make. I let two gamers jump straight into the seat without any progression, any acclimation protocol, any structured buildup. The person at the controls stepped back and essentially said have at it. My guys had a great time. They drove fast, cut corners, bumped curbs, and figured out very quickly how the system responded to their inputs. What they were doing, whether they knew it or not, was looking for the cheat codes. They weren't developing driving skill or decision-making. They were learning how to perform well inside the game. And the game let them.
That distinction matters enormously. When students are left to their own devices in a simulator — or when the instructor doesn't actively manage the environment — the learning that takes place is simulator learning. It doesn't transfer to the road because it was never about the road. It was about the screen and/or the game.
My third driver paid the price for how I'd set up that session. He sat down after watching two gamers run the system hard, with no progression, no acclimation, and within five minutes he was done. He didn't feel right for the next six hours. Motion platform and all. That wasn't the simulator's fault. That was mine. And it brought me right back to the same conclusion from 2006 — the technology isn't the determining factor. The instructor is.
Where Simulators Actually Belong
Here's where I've landed — and as I said at the outset, it isn't far from where I started.
Simulators are not a driving development tool. The core limitation is feel. Real driving skill is built through the physical feedback loop between driver and vehicle — what you sense through the wheel, the seat, the pedals, the whole body. A simulator, no matter how sophisticated, cannot fully replicate that. Until it can, it will always fall short as a tool for developing the physical side of driving. There’s also the inconsistency of the normal road user – they are unpredictable in the real world but the simulated traffic has the same tendencies and reactions every time. Perhaps the advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will help in that regard. (Sim companies, are you listening?)
But there are things a simulator does genuinely well, and I think we underuse those strengths by trying to force the technology into a role it wasn't designed for.
Decision-making is one of them. The simulator creates a controlled environment where you can put an officer in front of a complex scenario, pause it, rewind it, replay it, and dissect the decision. You can run the same scenario a dozen times and observe how judgment develops. That's valuable. The road doesn't give you that kind of repeatability.
Introduction to commentary driving is another. For students who are new to the concept — learning to vocalize what they're seeing, where their eyes are going, what they're predicting — the lower-stakes simulator environment can be a useful starting point before that work moves to the road. It takes some of the cognitive load off the physical driving task and lets the student focus on the thinking process.
And for new emergency vehicle operators, there's a real case to be made for simulator time before they ever touch a cruiser. Equipment familiarization. Getting comfortable with the layout, the controls, the basic orientation of the vehicle — before the stakes go up. Not as a substitute for road training. As a connection to it.
That's the lane I see for this technology. Decision-making development, early skill introduction, commentary driving familiarization, instructor development through observation and repetition. Augment the road. Don't replace it.
I Know I Have Blind Spots
I've been watching this technology for twenty years. My view of it has been consistent, but I also know that consistency can become its own kind of blindness.
If you run a simulator program, or you've seen one done well, I want to hear from you. Where does it fit in your curriculum? What changed when you added it? Where has it surprised you — in either direction? How do you scale your training?
And if you think I'm still missing something, tell me that too. Reply directly to this newsletter. If the responses are worth sharing — and I suspect they will be — I'll put together a follow-up issue with your thoughts front and centre.
Let's have the conversation.
— Hugh
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Hugh Anderson EVOC Trainer | Author of Emergency Vehicle Operation Instruction: 5 Steps to Enhancing Your EVOC Training Grab the book on Amazon