History of Driver's Ed: Simulators and Scare Films

By | January 4, 2019

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Driver's ed simulators from the '70s. Source: (Reddit)

Though it has a longer history, driver's education since the '50s has two components nobody can forget: driving simulators and scare films. The simulators were contraptions that were supposed to approximate driving conditions, and many vintage simulators are still in use today. But mastering the mechanics of steering, shifting and braking wasn't the only reason teens were taking driver's ed. There was also driver safety, and back in the day, the "safety" component was all about scaring the bejeezus out of the kids. So-called "scare films" included stern warnings, tales of lives ruined by carelessness, scenes of twisted wreckage, even graphic bloody imagery from real crashes -- nothing was out of bounds in the quest to keep teenagers from injury or death on the road. Over time, these films grew increasingly intense in their attempts to scare safe driving habits into young drivers. Why pay to see Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the theater when they're showing Death on the Highway at school for free?

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Steering wheel and dashboard of a 1960s Dodge driving simulator, as identifiied by Mecum Auctions. Source: (mecum.com)

The Father of Driver's Ed

Driver's education, the concept, was the brainchild of Amos Neyhart, a teacher of industrial safety at Penn State University. Following an incdent in which his parked car was hit by a drunk driver, Neyhart began advocating for safety, and landed on the revolutionary idea that instilling safe driving habits in kids would make them better drivers for life, and thus decrease accidents on the road. Neyhart began teaching driver's ed at State College High School in the mid-1930s, and authored the first textbook, The Safe Operation of an Automobile, in 1934.

Those Wacky Driver's Ed Simulators

Neyhart's instruction used his own 1929 Graham-Paige (that's a car) for demonstration and test driving, but getting kids on the road one at a time was inefficient given the number of students. In the early '50s, only about one percent of them were getting on-road instruction; to solve the problem, insurance company Aetna invented the Aetna Drivotrainer which was introduced in Brooklyn in 1953. Students sat in this boxy simulator, watched an instructional film projected in front of them, and attempted to move the wheel, pedals and gear shift as necessary. Instruments recorded their performance, and issued a printout assessing their abilities. 

The driving simulators became (and still are) a central feature of many driver's education classes, though later generations got to use something slightly cooler than the Drivotrainer. Simulators of the '60s and '70s were designed by automobile manufacturers and approximated the look and feel of actual production models -- so that teens could claim to have learned on, say, a Dodge Dart. It didn't have wheels or a roof or a real engine, but it had a real Dodge Dart seat, steering wheel, and dashboard.

If the vintage driver's ed simulators were odd-looking, the instructional films -- known as "scare films" -- were simply terrifying. They started out as cautionary tales about lives ruined, but drifted in more of a cinema verite direction, prioritizing discomforting visuals over real instructional information.