Rummaging through my iPhoto, I came across some photos of my trip to Toyota’s Higashifuji Technical Center in Susono City, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan, to check out the company’s driving simulator, which they claim to be the world’s largest and most advanced.

Driving simulators are important for one main reason: They allow you to test things — from new car technologies to over-the-counter meds — that you wouldn’t be able to do safely on the public road. I’m a bit of a driving simulator geek, having dodged debris falling from a truck on an Iowa road (it was part of a test of electronic stability control; and yes, it works) at the National Advanced Driving Simulator, frightened my minders with a vexing wrong-side-of-the-road drive (I realized how hard it is to shift with one’s left hand) at the TRL labs in the U.K., and had various other simulated drives elsewhere, in government and academic research facilities.

Both Toyota and NADS are pretty incredible — to recreate the feel of driving (which is said to be harder to recreate than flying), the capsule-like module, pictured below, must physically move around the vast hangar space. When you brake, it tilts forward; when you reverse, it tilts back. The tactile quality is convincing; one feels things like the gravel on the shoulder of the road.

One of the hazards of the driving simulator in general is so-called “simulator sickness,” due to the mismatch between your inner-ear sensations and what your eyes are seeing. I experienced a touch of it at Toyota, perhaps because I was the passenger in the vehicle (or maybe the way the driver was driving). But compared to the less sophisticated models, the ride is smooth. It was strange to look in the rear-view mirror and see the simulated environment receding.

I spent a lot of time simply examining the rendered landscape, the architecture, the vernacular signing, noticing small details like the cyclist in the crosswalk.

It is hard to go far in Japan without stumbling across some representation of the myth-drenched Mt. Fuji, as in this noodle shop in Tokyo.

Which is why I was delighted, if not totally surprised, to see Mt. Fuji hovering in this pixellated landscape.

It seemed to loom everywhere, recalling Roland Barthes’ declaration that the only place from which one could not see the Eiffel Tower was from within the tower itself. As fast as we drove, we seemed to get no closer.

Afterwards, I spent some time on the vast proving grounds, set up for the pilot test of an automated car.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 11:08 am and is filed under Cars, Etc., Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.