There’s a fight for control going on inside the cockpits of many modern cars. Enable all the active safety systems in a Tesla, and it’ll do most of the steering for you. But if it makes an errant turn or meanders a little too far this way or that in the lane (and trust me, it will), you’re left wrestling the wheel out of Autopilot’s virtual hands.

Assistance systems from other manufacturers do better at ceding control whenever you feel like taking over, but BMW is about to take that to a new level with the first car built on its upcoming Neue Klasse platform. It includes an advanced driver assist system that the company says is a proper symbiosis, where the car’s sensors and systems don’t fight with or yell at you but instead work with you to make driving safer and less stressful.

I sampled this suite in a prototype of BMW’s iX3, the first electric SUV on the Neue Klasse platform, designed from the ground up to offer more range, better handling, and way more smarts. BMW is promising 400 miles of range from a new battery architecture that can charge at up to 400 kW. That means adding something like 200 miles of range in 10 minutes, but there’s a lot more to it than that.

Better brains

At the core of the iX3’s safety system is a computing platform that BMW calls a “superbrain.” That’s an evocative term for a Qualcomm Snapdragon Ride chip, but it does offer far more power than anything the company has put on the road before. That’s paired with a more advanced sensor suite, with better cameras and higher-fidelity radar sensors, all combined to give a better view of the world around.

One of those key sensors is the driver monitoring suite, which can detect where you’re looking and whether you’re paying attention while behind the wheel. Plenty of cars offer some degree of monitoring like this, usually nagging you with beeping and blinking unpleasantries when your eyes linger on a roadside distraction for too long. The iX3 goes beyond that by using eye-tracking technology to not just complain, but actually improve your experience.

If you’re driving down the highway and BMW’s highway assistant is active, it’ll steer itself and even change lanes. In some current BMWs, you can just look in the mirror to initiate a lane change. The iX3 takes that a step further by proactively putting on the turn signal for you should you take the wheel and change lanes yourself.

Yes, finally, a BMW designed to tackle the most common preconception about BMW drivers: they never signal before changing lanes.

Try to change lanes manually without checking the blind spot, the lane-keep assistance system will resist the change and try to keep you where you are. But, if you’ve looked first, the car won’t resist your control at all, as you’ve proved to it that you’re doing your part.

The car will detect your attention in other ways, too. I had a chance to drive next to a dummy pedestrian standing partially in my lane. Without any input from me, the car came smoothly to a stop. But, when I tried again, steering slightly to the left and showing that I was paying attention, the car allowed me to move out of the lane without resistance. 

Smooth driving, smoother stopping

I also got a chance to sample the other brain inside the new iX3, which the company has unfortunately labeled “Heart of Joy.” This in-house developed processor aggregates all the traction, stability, and electric motor management functions that are typically handled by a dozen different processors sourced from a dozen different suppliers and scattered throughout the car.

Unifying all that has some significant implications. The car can more quickly and seamlessly manage power to the dual motors that give it 400 horsepower and all-wheel drive, so when I was sliding the camouflaged prototype around a wet test track, it felt like the stability and traction control systems were working to help me, rather than just trying desperately to slow me down.

But when it was time to pause the action, something almost magical happened. On a test track, I was told to close my eyes and let the iX3 bring itself to a stop. That process of deceleration was so smooth that I genuinely couldn’t tell when the wheels had stopped rolling. The new systems controlling those electric motors allow more precise application of the regenerative braking function. That not only means smoother one-pedal driving, but the kind of perfectly controlled stop that’ll keep your passengers from getting jostled at every red light.

An irresistible EV?

Ultra-smooth stopping is a small thing, but it really does increase the comfort of driving around in the iX3. By the end of the day, I was blown away by everything BMW’s new EV brings to the table. And that’s on top of the big, dashboard-spanning Panoramic Vision display, which runs from one pillar to another to provide a customizable and interactive information display.

The big question, though, is whether any of this will be enough to convince the largely EV-skeptical luxury car buyers out there that all this is good enough to finally make the switch away from internal combustion. The company’s gas-powered X3 is consistently one of its top sellers, and while that isn’t going away, BMW clearly has high hopes that the iX3 will bring that kind of sales success to its battery-powered efforts. 

But it’s just the first of multiple models planned on this Neue Klasse platform, all with the same combination of tech and finesse. If they’re successful, maybe the world can finally put that BMW blinker stigma to bed for good. 

In The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton wrote about killer alien space crystals that are (spoiler alert) ultimately stymied by Earth’s breadth of pH values. In reality, crystals grown in space could be key to a new generation of cancer-fighting treatments that save lives, not threaten them.

Colorado-based startup Sierra Space is nearly ready to launch its reusable space plane, Dream Chaser. It’s set to carry into orbit a 3-D printed module designed by engineers at pharma giant Merck. If the test goes well, and if Dream Chaser’s gentle reentry process keeps that sensitive cargo safe, this could be the start of something big — despite those crystals being microscopic.

A brief history of space crystals

Space crystals sound like something an astrology guru would hang over their bed to help them sleep, but there’s real science here. According to the ISS National Lab, crystals grown in space are simply better: “Scientists hypothesize that these observed benefits result from a slower, more uniform movement of molecules into a crystalline lattice in microgravity.”

Research into monoclonal antibodies points towards crystallization as being key for developing more stable, subcutaneous delivery mechanisms. Theoretically, expensive chemotherapy sessions could be replaced by injections that a patient could self-administer at home. 

It’s the stuff of science fiction — and in the case of The Andromeda Strain, it literally is — but the truth is actually closer to Back to the Future. Space crystal research actually began in the early ’80s, first on one-off rocket flights and eventually on the Space Shuttle.

There was much hope (and hype) about the tech back then, but it was ultimately stymied by two things. The first is cost. The Space Shuttle orbiter was to be America’s low-cost orbital research transporter, but that never panned out. NASA’s own per-mission costs pegged each flight at somewhere around $1.5 billion. That’s simply far too expensive, even in the pharma industry, where reporting quarterly profits often requires seven or more digits.

The rise of SpaceX and its competitors has brought those costs down substantially, lowering the cost of getting cargo into space to a relatively paltry $2,000 per kg. But that still leaves the other problem: shock. 

If you’re going all the way to orbit just to grow some ultrafine structures, you don’t want to rattle them to pieces on the way back down. 

“It’s about a 20 mph car crash equivalent into the ground,” Dr. Tom Marshburn said of the experience of landing in a capsule like Dragon. He would know. Marshburn is chief astronaut at Sierra and the company’s VP of human factors engineering, but before that he was a NASA astronaut. He’s flown on the Shuttle, Soyuz, and Dragon.

Sierra and its reusable Dream Chaser aircraft stand poised to fix both problems, cost and shock, in one fell swoop.

Easy entry

Those of us of a certain age will likely feel a sort of irrational affinity for Dream Chaser at first glance. Its black and white color scheme and simple, lifting body design give strong Space Shuttle orbiter vibes, but this is no retro design intended to earn throwback cred. Dream Chaser has some major advantages over Shuttle.

For one thing, it’s much smaller, about one-quarter the length. It fits neatly inside a payload compartment of a ULA (United Launch Alliance) Vulcan rocket, not requiring the messy combination of tanks, liquid and solid fuel boosters, and endless specialized hardware that stymied any hope the Space Shuttle had in being profitable.

It also doesn’t require a three-mile-long runway like the Shuttle. “It can do a precision landing anywhere a 737 can land,” Dr. Marshburn said. 

The biggest change, though, is that it won’t fly with crew onboard. For now, at least. Dream Chaser was born out of the Commercial Crew Transportation Capabilities (CCtCap) contract, a competition that also included SpaceX’s Dragon capsule and Boeing’s Starliner capsule. NASA selected two winners, and Sierra Space was unlucky to place third.

However, seeing the potential, NASA offered enough orbital cargo contracts to make a Dream Chaser reboot worthwhile. A subtly redesigned space plane will launch and land as planned, just minus the people. 

Why did NASA want to keep Sierra Space in the loop? Dream Chaser’s design offers some real benefits, particularly as we potentially enter an age of space manufacturing. “A capsule like a Dragon, by the nature of the physics, of the shape of it, can bring down only half of what it takes up,” said Meagan Crawford, founder and managing partner at SpaceFund, an early-stage venture capital investment fund with a focus on commercial space. “The space plane has the opposite physics, it can bring down twice as much as it takes up.” 

An ideal orbital transport and manufacturing network, then, has a combination of the two.

Microgravity potential

That’s the potential. For now, the project with Merck is something of a proof of concept, a 3D-printed module containing a series of tubes, plungers, and capsules. Once it gets to the ISS, a willing astronaut will turn some valves in sequence, then the resulting concoction will be shuttled back to Earth for someone at Merck to examine.

And they’ll be able to do so quickly. Dr. Marshburn said that traditional reentry capsules like Dragon or Soyuz often spend days bouncing on boats or trucks before their cargo can be retrieved. Dream Chaser was designed for cargo to be offloaded within an hour after its wheels stop rolling. 

The Merck module will test that quick retrieval, plus the soft landing, ensuring the potential for this sort of crystalline growth in space. And, though the ISS is itself set to be decommissioned by the end of the decade, Sierra Space is positioning its own inflatable orbital modules as a commercial alternative, free of the politics and oversight of the ISS.

Space Fund’s Crawford said that the economics are sound, and the proof is in the number of players trying to capitalize on the space plane market. Startups like Venus Aerospace, Radian Aerospace, Dawn Aerospace, and Virgin Galactic each have their own aircraft in development, with goals ranging from cargo to space tourism.

Space drug development has the potential to be hugely promising, but Sierra has a few other arrows in its quiver. It’s partnering with Honda to get a next-gen fuel cell into space, and those of you craving smaller and better processors could be in luck too. A startup called Space Forge plans to grow processor substrates in orbit, another area where gentle touchdowns are key. In shattering today’s mission cost barriers, Sierra Space might just blow through the semiconductor nanometer barrier, too.

Softer cargo

There’s hope for one more type of cargo to come out of these missions. For now, Dream Chaser is relegated to transport only cargo, but the stumbles of the Starliner program could reopen the door to hauling humans.

“You see a winged body and of course, astronauts, especially test pilots, we want to be in that,” Dr. Marshburn said. “At any point, we’d be able to leverage the work that’s already been done to get that ready.”

If that does come to pass, it’ll take some time. Tenacity, the first Dream Chaser, is going through final checks at NASA, waiting for its chance to head to the ISS sometime later this year. The second, Reverence, is currently under production.

In other words: Watch this space.

There’s an unbelievable amount of work going on right now to boost the performance of lithium-ion batteries. PhDs around the globe are, at this very moment, furrowing their respective brows, trying to eke out a few percentage points of extra energy density, shave a few minutes off of charging times, or add a few months to a given cell’s effective lifespan.

And then along comes a startup called Breathe Battery Technologies with an algorithm that promises to boost charging speeds by upward of 30 percent, all while preserving the lifespan of those cells. It’s part of a software package light enough to run on ancient embedded systems and small enough to be deployed via over-the-air updates. Best of all, it’s not theoretical: Volvo will feature this tech on the company’s upcoming ES90 sedan, and you can already find it on some smartphones.

Here’s how it works. 

Battery basics

Before we delve into the details, let’s quickly run through exactly what’s happening inside a battery. The charge provided by a battery happens when ions flow from anode to cathode, then journey across the electrolyte while carrying electrons with them. When it’s time to recharge, the process is effectively reversed, shoving those ions back across the void as quickly as possible.

These processes generate heat, and while some heat is fine, too much can damage the battery. Overheat your cells? Best case, their lifespan is reduced. Worst case? Well, you’d better stand back. 

Charging, and particularly fast charging, is a careful dance between wasting time by charging too slowly and damaging the battery by charging too quickly. In most EVs, that dance is choreographed by a lookup table.

Similar to the fuel injection tables of yore that dictate how much juice to squirt into the cylinder for each combustion cycle in an engine, battery tables say precisely how much current should be applied to a given cell at a given temperature and state of charge. 

The problem is, those tables aren’t very good. 

Turning the tables

To use these tables, you must know the battery’s temperature and state of charge. Find those figures, and the table tells you how much current can be applied to recharge the battery. It literally defines the charge curve for the cell. These tables are developed by the companies that make the cells (like Samsung SDI or LG Energy Solution) and the companies that put them in their cars.

The problem is that these lookup tables can be vague, lacking specific values for every temperature and state of charge. A lack of data fidelity makes for imprecise results. It’s like trying to draw a beautiful, flowing curve, but you can only use a few straight lines. 

The tables are also inflexible, covering a narrow range of temperatures. “If you start with a table, you are fundamentally locked into the dimensions of that table. You are really bottlenecking yourself from the very get-go,” Ian Campbell, the CEO of Breathe, said.

Additionally, cars often waste a lot of energy to keep the batteries in a very narrow temperature range just to optimize the use of the lookup table. “You need to heat up or cool down the battery in order to prepare for this fast charging, and that also consumes a lot of energy,” Björn Fridholm, technical specialist in battery management at Volvo, added. 

That takes us back to Breathe and its special sauce. You’re still working with the same basic factors: voltage, temperature, and current. Here, though, a software package (called Breathe Charge) determines the ideal charging rate with much more precision across a wider performance envelope than could be reasonably contained within a table. 

“So you end up with this incredible level of fidelity and adaptivity across all timescales,” Campbell said. 

To resurrect the metaphor from above, instead of jagged lines, you can now draw flowing charging curves that more closely match the ideal performance of the individual battery cells.

By mirroring that curve, cars equipped with Breathe’s tech will charge faster without putting any additional stress on the battery cells. And by providing a wider range of data, cars can charge more quickly even when outside their ideal thermal windows.

How much more quickly? Breathe and Volvo say this tech delivers a 30 percent reduction in charge time when going from 10 to 80 percent on a high-speed charger. But Breathe’s algorithm also delivers even bigger improvements when operating outside of ideal conditions. At zero degrees Celsius, that charge time improvement was 48 percent. 

System constraints

Why isn’t everyone doing this? It comes down to two constraints, the first being a deep enough understanding of the behavior of the individual cells. To gather that data, Breathe has a pair of labs in London where it stress tests sample cells from manufacturers. 

Breathe determines a given cell chemistry’s strengths and weaknesses, breaking those chemical attributes into computer data, which drives the company’s digital physics model.

That then takes us to the second constraint: system overhead. While manufacturers and chipmakers love to talk about cars becoming supercomputers on wheels, the reality is that most of today’s cars still rely on embedded systems, dated chips with limited memory, and specs closer to yesterday’s graphing calculators than today’s GPU-laden rigs.

Efficiency is key. Breathe’s algorithm requires minimal processor cycles and fewer than 10 kilobytes of memory. The lightweight nature means that Breathe’s tech can be run on all sorts of limited hardware, even deployed via over-the-air updates — assuming those integrated systems are smart enough to be reflashed remotely. 

Getting that efficiency means reliance on industry simulation and physics modeling tools, primarily MATLAB and Simulink. However, Campbell said that Breathe (which currently numbers about 75 employees) is working on future versions for the faster automotive processors to come.

Many of these future automotive processing chips also deliver some aspect of onboard AI, but it isn’t on the roadmap for Breathe. Campbell said he’s “bullish” on machine learning tech in this application but that it isn’t quite ready yet. 

But the biggest constraint is the battery cells themselves. The amount of current they can receive is dictated by their construction and chemistry. Breathe Charge doesn’t violate the laws of physics; it simply ensures that the car is always feeding the right amount of current at the right time.

Rolling out

Volvo’s electric ES90, with Breathe Charge onboard, is slated to hit the market later this year. Fridholm confirmed the software could theoretically run on Volvo’s other EVs, including those already on the market, but he made it clear that we shouldn’t expect charge-boosting over-the-air updates hitting models like the EX30 anytime soon. “For now, we’re launching it on the ES90,” he said, and left it at that. 

But Breathe won’t stop there. On its Careers page, the company currently has openings for sales-related positions in Detroit, Michigan — American auto manufacturers are clearly a target. 

Breathe’s tech can also be found on the Oppo 8, where it’s optimized to extend battery health. Campbell said the company is also working to line up “a couple of cool customers” on the consumer devices front. In other words, hopefully we’ll be able to sample some fast-charging software in something a bit more affordable than a new Volvo soon.

Last October, the Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 set a top speed of 233 mph on consecutive runs around a closed track. That’s not the fastest street-legal production car in the world: the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+ will, as the name implies, top 300 mph. What’s special about the ZR1, then? Its $174,995 starting price may sound expensive, but it’s a steal compared to the Bugatti, which costs somewhere north of $4 million. The ZR1 is officially the world’s fastest production car available for less than $1 million. 

The ZR1 achieved that speed on a massive test track in Papenburg, Germany, a place where the banking is so steep that the drivers suffered through 1.7 vertical Gs on the turns. That’s just one number out of an endless series of figures that the team behind that record-setting run calculated well in advance, tapping into simulations usually reserved for more utilitarian jobs, like figuring out how steep a grade a Silverado can tow up before blowing a gasket.

Here, the only number that really mattered was top speed — a figure that, in simulation, differed from reality by less than half of one percent. This is how they did it.

Everyday Hero

The Corvette has always been a machine punching above its weight in the competitive ring of international performance cars. I don’t mean that literally, as it is often the heaviest option within sports car shootouts. But, when compared to competitors from Porsche, Ferrari, and Lamborghini, the Corvette is the perennial value option, an everyman American choice out there making the world’s best look a little bit silly.

The ZR1, though, elevates that formula to another level with more power and better handling. While the code “ZR1” first appeared as an engine upgrade on the third-generation Corvette in the early 1970s — a limited option hardly anyone picked — it wasn’t until the C4 of the ’90s that the ZR1 appeared as the top-shelf trim of the Corvette. 

The first ZR1 was a revelation, compared favorably to period icons like the Ferrari 348 despite costing half as much. The latest ZR1 looks set to continue that legacy while raising the performance bar to new heights. You already know the thing’s top speed, delivered by a whopping 1,064-horsepower, 5.5-liter twin-turbocharged V8. Everything else has been upgraded to match, including carbon ceramic brakes, wheels made of carbon fiber, and sticky Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 R tires.

It’s a machine built to satisfy anyone’s need for speed. While its starting price means it’s hardly a good fit for every budget, it’s still outperforming machines that cost much, much more.

The months of work leading up to the test run began with one simple question: where in the world can you safely test a car like this?

The Venue 

Engineers at General Motors knew early that the new ZR1 was going to be the company’s fastest production car ever. The first problem was finding a safe place to find out exactly how fast. While GM has plenty of facilities of its own, including a 4.5-mile circle track in Milford, Michigan, the team behind the record-breaking run knew they needed somewhere bigger.

The High-Speed Oval at ATP Automotive Testing in Papenburg is certainly big. The track is 7.6 miles in total length, each straight running 2.5 miles before the asphalt turns back on itself. At 233 mph, those straights fly by in less than 30 seconds. 

It’s the perfect playground for this sort of testing, but since it isn’t a GM-owned facility, the team wouldn’t have infinite time — just three hours spread over Friday and Saturday mornings. 

The idea was to optimize everything in advance and calculate every detail from car alignment to tire pressure, leaving nothing to chance on the day of. “Go do this, and we’ll break some records,” Jason Kolk, simulation integration lead at GM, told me.

With the location selected, the simulations could properly begin. They started with a virtual model of every element of the car, which the team called a “virtual vehicle” — a digital twin to simulate aerodynamics and engine output as accurately as possible. “We even have a virtual ECU and controllers,” said Ping Hwang, GM’s performance systems integration engineer.

In a regular production car, these digital twins are primarily used to track changes during development and test reliability and efficiency. “The same physics model can be applied to towing, to range, to different temperatures,” said Wesley Haney, senior calibration engineer at GM. 

It isn’t a single simulation that handles all this, but rather a suite, including off-the-shelf solutions like CarSim mixed with custom options written in C, Python, and even Fortran, a programming language that dates back to the 1950s and will surely outlive us all. 

Despite the digital horsepower provided by GM’s high-performance computing centers in Michigan, it’s safe to say this application pushed all those tools to the limits. “We didn’t actually have a tire model that was run at that speed. Like, how much is the tire going to expand that speed?” Kolk said. 

Fuel consumption can also be simulated, and there was a novel factor at play here: thrust. Running full-throttle at redline, the ZR1 generates 37 pounds of force from the engine exhaust alone. While that’s nothing compared to a SpaceX engine, every little bit helps when you’re trying to break records.

Beyond horsepower and thrust, aerodynamic drag is a huge factor. But Corvette engineers had already designed a low-drag aerodynamic package ideal for this application, ditching the ZR1’s big wing in exchange for speed. So, no tweaks were needed there. 

Early Laps

The team first applied the simulations to runs on GM’s own circle track at Milford, where the car was soon lapping for real at 225 mph, already 13 mph faster than the official top speed of the ZR1’s previous generation. 

Believe it or not, that was unwelcome news. According to the simulations, the car should have run faster. 

Jake Hedrick, virtual propulsion engineer at GM, started poring over the data. After further investigation, he determined it wasn’t the simulation that was off, but the car itself. “What we were seeing is that, analytically, we were about 80 horsepower down,” Hedrick said. “That was due to multiple factors, but mainly driven by the spark calibration.”

“Spark” here refers to ignition timing, when the engine controller in the car tells the spark plugs to fire. If it’s too early, the explosive force of combustion fights the rotation of the engine. If it’s too late, you don’t get complete combustion of the fuel before the exhaust valve opens and the next cycle begins.

With this real-world data, the team optimized the engine mapping, unlocking the missing power the simulation said should have been there. 

They also analyzed things like ride height and alignment, too. “We found if we lowered the car just a hair, we could get a tenth of a mile per hour,” Kolk said. But the team decided to leave that on the table due to time constraints. 

That just left the question of weather, the one factor that the team couldn’t control. They could, though, look at historic trends. The team analyzed years of historic conditions to find the ideal time for their run: cool temperatures and low wind. 

Wind is bad because, to set the record, the car’s speed is averaged over two runs in opposite directions. Any help you get from a tailwind will be more than negated when headed in the opposite direction. 

“But our wind on Saturday was almost nonexistent. It was really ideal conditions,” Kolk said, setting the stage for speed. 

The Big Day

The simulations had factored in everything possible and predicted everything they couldn’t calculate. The team even determined the optimal place on the track where the driver should open the throttle wide for the run, or “go to WOT” as the team put it. 

But there was still the human variable. None of the simulations told the team just how stable or unstable the car would feel when going around the 50-degree banked turns at over 200 mph. The driver would need to put their foot to the floor well before they got to the straightaway.

“Would the driver feel a sense of like, ‘I can’t go to the pedal yet?'” Kolk said. “Or, if they went WOT too early, would that add a lot of heat to the system?”

Chris Barber, lead development engineer on the Corvette ZR1 and one of the drivers at the track, said that everything felt right from the beginning. “When we did our first actual 200-mph-plus test, all the drivers were so confident that we just went for it,” he said.

“It was amazing to just go to wide open throttle well over 200 miles an hour,” Barber said, describing what it was like to go screaming through the turn at three times the average highway speed limit and then putting his right foot to the floor. “You’re almost looking sideways at the sky… then once you get onto the straightaway, it just whizzes by so fast.” 

But there was a last-minute issue. During Friday’s test runs, the car was losing speed, coming up short of projections. The ZR1’s V8 engine is designed to run at 8,000 RPM. In the perfect world of the simulation, that’s fast enough to hit the maximum velocity of the Corvette. However, reality isn’t so smooth. With the tires skipping over bumps, the revs would spike, causing the car to hit the rev limiter. “Once you touch that limit, it wants to shut the party down, and it effectively ends the run,” Haney said.

To fix this, the team raised the rev limit by 100 rpm only in sixth gear, giving just enough headroom for the engine to bring the car to its top speed without stumbling. That raised redline, plus the revised engine timing, will all be part of the production ZR1, which will include a driving mode aptly called Top Speed. 

With that, everything was set. But instead of relying on a test driver to make that final run, GM president Mark Reuss got the nod. The team wanted to show that it didn’t take a professional race car driver to extract this kind of performance from the machine. The final result, with Reuss at the wheel, was an average of 233.29 mph. 

How does that figure compare to the simulation? When the team took the exact weather conditions and plugged them into the sim, the number was 232.2, just 1.09 mph off. The team thinks the difference comes down to the tire diameter increasing at speed, something the simulation can’t handle — not yet, at least. 

Kolk said that result was proof that the simulations are absolutely on the money, which will help engineers optimize more pedestrian products to solve equally challenging problems. Aerodynamic and thermal performance are obviously key when you’re trying to top 230 mph on the track, but it’s even more important in some of the most complicated on-road challenges, like increasing the range of heavy-duty EVs when towing. 

“We do all this work up front so we don’t have to worry about one system holding everything else back from achieving something really great,” Kolk said. Better simulations mean engineering teams can develop cheaper, lighter parts more quickly, iterating in the digital world rather than the physical.

So, while driving simulators are a good thing for gaming, they can certainly help you out in the real world, too. “That was by far my high score,” Barber said.