a road to nowhere

In a carriage which only one may enter, you drive across the expanse. But not featureless. Great strata of light and dark grey pass beneath you; sudden poles appear before you, totems in primary colours; green cones float, ominous but ineffectual, in the distance. Time becomes warped; motion stutters; the vision flickers. You are alone, yet one is with you who speaks in many voices, of instruction, of conciliation, of danger.

'Clutch up a fraction. Keep your feet still. Check your mirrors. You've stalled.'

Welcome to the world of the driving simulator.

Clearly, to be able to practice the motions of driving without risk to safety, sanity and property is a fine thing. In a simulator, you learn quickly. The controls, culled from an actual car, feelingly resemble the reality. It's appropriately unlike an arcade game (their graphics are better). But the problems of having a computer teach you your first turns of the wheel grew apparent.

There are bugs, of an occasional but fiddly kind. Should you do things too quickly or in the wrong order, this instructor shuts his eyes and puts his hands over his ears in exasperation and refuses to recognise anything you do from that point. To regain my guide's attention, I had to crash into a building. Piqued at this, he ignored my gearchanges and swiftly ejected me from a later exercise. I realise this is new technology, but I'd expected some maturity. (Though, conversely, he did turn a blind eye to my furtive braking during clutch-control exercises. A fickle god is this computer.)

Nor will you find any trace of flexibility. Fail to comply with the dictates of the sim's algorithms, and you face endless repetitions. If you're asked to brake to ten miles an hour half a mile from a junction, by God, you must brake. For example. An acceleration exercise. It was, I understood, important that, on reaching a marker, I had attained a speed of forty miles per hour. ('There's a bomb in this car!' If only.) Then fifty, then sixty. Fine, thought I.

Sixty proved to be the clincher.

Fiddle with handbrake and clutch. Jerk away from the line with the traditional kangaroo gait. An ecstasy of fumbling through the gears: first, second, third, fourth, fifth... yes... reaching... ah. Fifty-eight miles per hour. Surely that'll -

'You're going too slowly. Accelerate faster next time.'

Okay. First second third fourth fifth and - fifty-eight.

'You're going too slowly. Accelerate faster next time.'

Fifty-eight.

'You're going too slowly. Accelerate faster next time.'

I'm going mad. Stop pissing me about next time.

'You appear to be having trouble with this exercise. Take some time to practice your skills before returning to it' - or rather, starting again. From the beginning.

Hngh.

Throughout my time in the box, each warning was delivered in the same tone of quiet, understanding explication mastered by nursery teachers the world over. Never a loss of patience, never an increase of urgency as I reeled across the road and endangered the umpteenth potential pedestrian. Just understanding: incessant, harrowing understanding, wasted (I soon felt) on such a motor-deficient dullard as I.

More disconcertingly, my electronic instructor appeared to be transexual. Actively transexual. At irregular intervals, male was replaced by female, and vice-versa, often in mid-exercise. An uncanny impressionist? A team of two in the back? A freak of nature? Two conflicting principles - that women's voices are more soothing and that only one sex would be sexism - had evidently collided. Perhaps the Nasty-Nice strategy was also entangled, as the female voice was usually the bearer of bad news. Yet stranger, as I neared the end, a third voice issued out of (apparently) a large room a few hundred miles to the north of the other two. Possibly a psychiatric ward: 'You turned early, which was good. Well done. Well done: you kept the right road position. Well done.' Who let these people into my car?

Above all this is the simulator's surreality. The illusion of being there is forestalled by the flatness (and occasional wobbles) of the monitors, the receptionists' enquiries in the background and a door which swings open at moments of elbow-flailing steer. For your ease, the roads you travel are deserted: I wondered why we're so hurried to build more without people to use them. It's an instructor's dream realised: a residential area where no-one lives, all five feet from the office. Yet you're required to 'be there', to imagine the non-existent pedestrians and cars so that watching your mirrors and your turning circle isn't a futile routine. Or that is what they intend, to instil a routine which carries on even when not needed. The simulator hasn't only been programmed: quietly it programs you. Which, in controlling the complicated and lethal device called a car, is welcome.