Simulator serves up hell on wheels

Reporter Mathew Dearnaley spins out his vehicle while trying out the new Fulton Hogan driving simulator under the watchful eye of Glenn Williams. Photo / Jason Oxenham

Roading company buys $180,000 machines to test its drivers’ skills.

I spun off the road twice in 10 minutes yesterday - and yet they let me keep "driving."

Luckily, it wasn't a Herald pool car I crashed into a couple of South Island paddocks, but a new $180,000 machine programmed to simulate driving anything from small hatchbacks to 44-tonne truck-and-trailer units and even snow ploughs.

The trailer-mounted simulator is one of two that roading giant Fulton Hogan has bought to train its 3800 staff and - once their skills have been honed - secondary school students preparing to venture out on the road.

My turn on the machine was an exercise in humility, despite the forbearance of Canterbury-based training manager Glenn Williams. I should have snapped up his offer to switch to automatic rather than manual gears.

He let me start in a Toyota Prius car configuration, before letting me loose on a 40-tonne semi-trailer unit, but I failed even to get past first gear without stalling three times.

Fulton Hogan chief Robert Jones rubbed salt into my wounded pride by pointing out I had also started my trip without releasing the handbrake, ignoring prompts from an on-board message robot.

Although I strangely passed 11 other driving measures - such as keeping safe following distances and signalling - with flying colours, the three stalls meant an automatic fail.

I had also taken 12 minutes to travel just under 4km, meaning an average speed of below 24km/h. Several minutes had been squandered on my shaky start, and Mr Williams said he expected I would have done better with a 10-minute free warm-up, as most other players are offered.

Buthe wasn't as impressed as the machine with my doddery driving, noting "candidates" are assessed by human instructors as well before being allowed to graduate to real vehicles in Fulton Hogan's fleet.

Worse was to come, after a second less formal exercise on the machine's rain setting - another of 41 programmes that include weather and urban hazards, and distractions such as GPS devices and mobile phones.

That had me skidding off the road twice after failing to brake soon enough to turn corners safely.

The final hurdle was a short spell in semi-trailer mode, which I miraculously survived without crashing, despite an over-revved start and a car swerving in front of me from a merging on-ramp.

It could have been worse. We didn't have time for me to go through a simulation "where the driver stops at a hotel and has five beers.'

"It gives people an appreciation of [the dangers of] drinking an driving," he said.

Mr Jones confessed the simulator felt "bit unusual" to him as well, when he had a short session in it without a 10-minute warm-up drive.

But he didn't reveal how the machine rated him.

Mr Jones said the two simulators, one of which would be towed between depots in the North Island and the other in the South, offered a far greater range of driving experiences than manual advanced courses on which the company previously relied.

Although they can prepare novice drivers for licence tests, he said the company would use them mainly to polish skills or assess the aptitude of staff before allowing them to graduate to heavier or specialised vehicles.