Learning to drive has never been cheap. Lessons are expensive, and supervised practice hours feel painfully limited even when things are going well.
So when the pandemic hit and driving lessons became impossible, I did what any self-respecting sim racing fan would do: I “borrowed” my friend’s Logitech G29, dragged a dining chair in front of my desk, and spent hundreds of hours in Euro Truck Simulator 2 convincing myself this counted as lessons.
Here's the thing: it kind of worked. By the time I finally got behind the wheel of a real car, I was genuinely comfortable with steering inputs, road positioning, and traffic awareness in a way I hadn't expected.
The catch, and I cannot stress this enough, is that truck simulator physics are not calibrated for our family SUV. I spent my first few weeks as a real driver absolutely butchering turns because my brain had calibrated to the turning radius of a semi-truck.
Sims teach real skills, but they also teach their own quirks. The trick is knowing which is which and choosing the right sim for what you actually want to learn.
Euro Truck Simulator 2 / American Truck Simulator
Best for: Road awareness, long-distance confidence, mirror discipline
I'm obviously biased here, but ETS2 genuinely made me a more aware road user before I'd ever taken a lesson. SCS Software's trucking titles aren't marketed as driving schools (the Driving Academy modules help, though), but the pace of play forces you to think the way good drivers think.
Looking further ahead, planning for junctions early, and reading signs before they're on top of you. Managing a large vehicle through traffic builds spatial awareness that carries over to smaller cars more than you'd expect.
Mirror discipline is the other big one. Trucks demand constant mirror checks, and ETS2 rewards you for building that habit. I still check my mirrors more than most people I drive with, and I'm fairly confident that's where it came from.
The obvious downside is the turning radius problem. Go in knowing that your brain will adapt to wide truck geometry, and give yourself a few real sessions to shake it off before you trust your own judgment in a car park.
City Car Driving
Best for: Rules of the road, hazard awareness, urban driving basics
City Car Driving is the most openly educational sim on this list, and it leans into that identity completely. The scenarios are mundane by design: junctions, pedestrian crossings, parallel parking, roundabouts, merging onto expressways. The physics are tuned to feel like an ordinary, everyday car rather than anything exotic, which is exactly what a learner needs.
What I found most useful about it, even as a supplement to ETS2, was the active penalty system. The game calls you out for jumping red lights, cutting corners at junctions, or failing to yield, and that feedback loop does something useful to your brain when you're still trying to internalize the rules.
It handles rain and low visibility scenarios well, which is genuinely valuable practice for conditions that make new drivers nervous. It won't build smoothness or give you any feel for how weight moves through a car; it’s not pretty, either. For pure rules-and-awareness drilling, though, it's hard to beat, and the price point is very easy to justify.
BeamNG.drive
Best for: Vehicle physics, weight transfer, understanding what happens when things go wrong
BeamNG is something special. The soft-body physics model means every crash is a consequence of something, and that's what makes it so useful as a learning tool.
Understeer into a bend too fast, and the car pushes wide the way a real car would. Brake too hard on a wet road and you feel it lose grip. The sim is constantly showing you the relationship between inputs and outcomes, which is exactly what new drivers struggle to understand in the abstract.
I'll be honest: most people's first hour in BeamNG is spent driving off cliffs to watch the deformation model work. That's fine. Get it out of your system. Once you start using it with actual intent, road cars through normal scenarios, practicing threshold braking, learning where the grip limit lives, it becomes a genuinely excellent physics classroom.
A wheel is basically mandatory here. Mouse and keyboard input remove almost all of the nuance that makes the physics simulation worth engaging with.
Assetto Corsa / Assetto Corsa Competizione
Best for: Steering feel, throttle control, reading a road surface
These are the enthusiast picks, and they earn that status. Assetto Corsa has a modding community large enough to include road cars on real-world road layouts, which opens up more practical scenarios than the base game would suggest. The tire model is exceptional, and with a force feedback wheel, you develop a genuine sense of how a car communicates, what it feels like when grip is about to go, and what proper weight transfer through a corner actually is.
What AC teaches better than anything else on this list is smoothness. Ragged inputs get punished. Trailing the brake into a corner, feeding throttle out progressively as you unwind the wheel; the habits that make you faster in a sim are the same habits that make you safer on a road.
That's a genuinely useful overlap, and one I didn't fully appreciate until I noticed how much calmer my real-world driving felt after time in AC. ACC is more narrowly focused on circuit racing, so its road driving application is limited. For understanding the fundamentals of why smooth driving matters, both titles make a compelling case.
Microsoft Flight Simulator (Honorable Mention)
Best for: Attention management, thinking ahead, procedure discipline
This one is a curveball, but I mean it. Flight Simulator doesn't teach car control, but it builds the habit of managing multiple inputs simultaneously while thinking several steps ahead, something a lot of new drivers genuinely struggle with. There's a reason pilots who transition to driving tend to find it straightforward.
So, Do Sims Actually Work?
No simulator replaces real lessons with a real instructor and practice. The missing pieces, genuine consequences, unpredictable road users, and the physical sensation of a car moving under you cannot be fully replicated.
What Sims can do is give you a low-pressure space to build mental models, get comfortable with concepts, and develop habits before those habits need to hold up in the real world.
I'm glad I spent those lockdown hours in ETS2. I passed my test, I'm a confident driver, and my mirror discipline is genuinely good. I also spent months being slightly too generous with my turning radius.
Pick the sim that matches what you want to learn. Just know what you're getting into.
Stay tuned to racinggames.gg: the best website for racing game coverage.