Norway is currently ranked as one of the top nations in regard to road safety. However, continued efforts are applied as we stretch towards a goal of zero deaths and serious injuries in road traffic accidents. In this paper we explore if Norwegian driver education could benefit from simulator training. Possible advantages are cost effectiveness, environmentally friendly training, repeatability, accessibility to different scenarios (accident scenarios and dangerous situations, darkness and snow outside of winter, difficult weather conditions and extreme road traffic density), the possibility to make errors in a safe environment, and interaction with new technology such as advanced driver assistant systems. However, there are challenges such as how to increase the number of simulators in Norway, and legal obstacles as current legislations require all mandatory parts of the Norwegian driver education to be conducted on the road. Our overall impression is that the driver education in Norway could have advantages in applying a more systematic approach to simulator training.

In recent decades, simulators have become an increasingly accepted part of training in sectors like aviation, medicine, and the petroleum industry. Some countries like the Netherlands, the UK, and Finland have accepted simulators as a part of driver’s education, but in Norway the use of simulators is both limited and restricted. This experimental study aimed to determine whether simulator-based training in night driving could be beneficial compared to traditional Norwegian training. Two equal-sized groups of learner drivers completed both simulator training and traditional training, and both training sessions were followed by a multiple-choice test mapping the learner drivers’ theoretical knowledge on the topic. The results show that theoretical learning outcome is higher from simulator training compared to traditional training, indicating that an increased use of simulators could be beneficial in driver training.

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