How Gaming is Making Driving More Fun

Imagine if cars were just made for transportation duties. All we would see on the roads are boring boxes on wheels. Fortunately, that’s not the world we live in, and car designers have made sure that our cars are fun.

That fun can be found in the exterior appearance, the performance and the handling, but automakers are also putting in little games into cars to help lighten up the load of driving and make it more entertaining. Not only that, but cars are getting video game-inspired tweaks that help the vehicles appeal to a wider audience: one that grew up with a gamepad in their hands.

For example, the Nissan GT-R’s central display screen features graphics and visuals designed by the same team behind the popular Gran Turismo games for Playstation. One look at the display, and it’s clear that it was inspired by head-up displays from video games.

Gamers can probably all admit to trying a few radical things in racing games, like say, meaty burnouts. But doing stuff like that in the real world isn’t as easy as it looks in the games. Fortunately, new cars are coming with tools to help make you look like a video game action hero. Take the new Mustang with the performance package and track apps, for example. Thanks to an easy-to-use, video game-like interface for the electronic line-lock function, you can easily learn how to safely do burnouts without reading an entire owner’s manual. Of course, this feature is better suited for the track, where you aren’t going to be a nuisance turning your tires into smoke (which is a noisy and smelly affair).

A cool feature in racing games is the ability to record your lap times and compete against it. Corvettes are starting to incorporate some of that idea with the available Performance Data Recorder, or PDR. In simple terms, it’s an integrated GoPro camera that can overlay info like your throttle position, g-forces, steering angle, location on the track and your speed on the video footage. The resulting footage looks exactly like it would in a first-person racing game. It’s a great way to show your friends your fast lap times, or use it as a learning tool to help you go faster.

The Chevrolet Volt is an extended range electric vehicle. In simpler terms, it’s a plug-in hybrid vehicle with a beefy electric battery and a gas-powered engine that kicks in once the battery is depleted. The biggest goal of cars like this is to maximize range, and Chevrolet’s dashboard game helps coach drivers to be more energy efficient. It works by displaying a ball on the digital gauge cluster. If you accelerate too quickly or brake too suddenly, the ball moves up or down. The goal is to keep it perfectly centered for as long as you can. Achieve that, and you’ll maximize your range!

If you need any more proof that the world of cars and video games are converging, take a look at the Vision Gran Turismo program. Automakers are creating awesome concepts for the Gran Turismo video game, then making them into real things to display at auto shows and other events. Some automakers are even using the Vision GT concepts to influence their real cars. This is the path Bugatti took with the new Chiron hypercar, and Aston Martin’s latest hyper car, the AM-RB 1000 is very much like the Aston Martin DP-100 Vision GT concept for Gran Turismo.