$2M vs. $63,000: Luxury Racing Simulators

[car zooming sounds]

Jesus Christ!

[upbeat music]

I'm Jeremy White,

and I write about luxury tech for Wired.

And today, I'm testing two machines in the racing sim space.

I wanna find out exactly what you get when you spend 60k

on a racing sim like this,

[classical music] [bell dinging]

versus a $2 million machine like this.

[bell dinging] [techno music]

So why are we looking at racing simulators?

Well, motor racing is a rich boys' club.

You need to be loaded, or from a loaded family anyway,

to get access to this world.

But racing simulators democratize this space.

People like Jann Mardenborough,

who trained on Grand Turismo,

have now broken into the pro racing world for real.

Right, let's go and test the 60,000 pound

Prodrive Racing Simulator.

It's the most beautiful racing sim I've ever seen.

It's designed by the guy who designed Jaguars,

for heaven's sake!

It's made of the materials that they used

to make luxury super yachts.

If this isn't luxury tech, then I don't know what is!

[bright music]

We're in a very lucky person's garage

and this is the Prodrive Racing Simulator.

It is a thing of beauty.

So the main feature here of the Prodrive Simulator

is the bent beech frame that goes all the way around

and that is holding the suspended

carbon fiber monocoque frame.

You've got the shutoff power button

for the power steering wheel,

and then this button here turns the PC,

which is hidden in the nose, on and off.

Then inside, you've got the racing steering wheel,

and a racing seat.

And that, with the super wide screen,

is everything you need

for a luxurious home racing simulator.

I've gotta be careful because a very kind Prodrive customer

has let us test his own unit.

I'm gonna try and get in very gingerly. Here we go.

Oh, it's comfy! [seat whirring]

It's got sensors in the seat,

so you can only adjust the pedals

once you're actually sitting down in the seat.

Okay, pit lane limit, active.

Okay, already getting some feedback from the wheel.

Pedals are good. The pedals feel authentic.

Especially the brake pedal.

Nice and stiff, as it would be, in the racing pit.

Ooh.

Oh dear!

The screen is wide enough really,

to be almost at the edges of my field of view.

It's got really strong buttons

that you would get on a racing car for changing gear.

I mean, basically it feels like a really expensive Xbox.

Feels incredibly responsive.

Oh god!

With the Prodrive, the luxury element here

is about as much about the design as the driving experience.

In fact, probably more so.

It's probably more about how this machine looks

and how it can be part of your luxury home experience.

So the Prodrive, and undoubtedly a beautiful thing.

But the trouble with it was it's like a rich boys' toy.

The pedals, the steering wheel, the cabinet,

that's all something that you could possibly replicate

at home for a few hundred bucks.

It's not really pushing the envelope.

I look at luxury tech like this.

It's about the intersection

between price, design, and innovation,

and that middle sweet spot, where all those converge.

That's Wired luxury. But, there's a catch.

You've gotta consider the law of diminishing returns.

And this states that the value you get decreases

the more money you spend.

Look at it this way.

You spend 500 bucks on a Sonos speaker,

a high-end speaker will cost 200 times that,

but it'll only be 20 times better.

As we're looking at two luxury racing sims,

the Prodrive will be up at the top here,

about halfway through, 60k.

The $2 million Dynisma will be all the way along at the end.

[upbeat music]

So I wanna see what the Dynisma is like.

And this is F1 grade that you can now buy yourself.

Ferrari has one, for heaven's sake.

For a few million, you can have one too!

And I want to know what that's like.

The clever thing about it, the innovation is the latency,

the delay in inputs for using the racing simulator.

They've managed to get their racing sim down

to four milliseconds.

Most of the time they're 50 milliseconds or 60,

and that's brilliant.

This thing costs up to $12.6 million.

And yes, you will be able to get one of these

for your home one day.

This is the motion generator.

The secret to why this is so realistic.

This is the rig that allows it to move around.

Then you've got the struts.

I shouldn't be able to do this on a normal simulator rig,

but because it's so low friction, look, I can,

I can shift this on my own.

That's how low the friction is on this.

And then you've got the carbon fiber tub, an F4 tub.

The pedals that you reach through to around here

are actually higher than your lower body in the seat,

so you've got that different driving position.

And then as you step back,

we've got a massive wrap-around screen.

So I'm gonna try this out now to see how it really performs.

Let's do it. Come on!

Oh my word.

Oh, okay.

It does actually feel like you're there.

Oh, blimey!

Oh, there goes a curb strike.

Mind you, the brakes are unbelievable.

God, is this what it's really like

to drive in a Formula car round Monaco?

Oh my god.

Jesus Christ!

Yeah! We're never gonna make that chicane.

No, no, that's again, did it again.

I can't make that, that's ridiculous.

I'm feeling absolutely humbled, really.

But it's superbly convincing.

Very quickly, you feel like you're actually there.

It's like the,

you can feel the back end of the car going out.

The acceleration is absolutely phenomenal.

All you can see is this massive screen.

And I have no idea how humans drive faster

than that round this course, basically.

The thing is, Dynisma is so pro,

that I don't think I can test it all on my own.

We need a pro racing sim driver, and that is George.

George is not only a pro racing sim driver,

he's also a pro driver in the real world.

Oh!

This is mega. [George laughing]

This feels amazing. Oh, it's feeling really good.

Like you say,

you feel everything on the rear of the car.

Every time I go over a curb, it feels so realistic.

I'm so used to static sims,

and I've never experienced a sim like this before

with the motion.

So in a weird way,

it was training my brain that this is real.

The more I'm going around now,

the more visually and mentally my brain's accepting it.

And this is quite easily the closest

I've ever driven to anything.

I think my heart rate is probably,

I'm even sharing these right now.

Oh god, it's just fantastic.

[car zooming sounds]

They've just changed the settings for George,

giving him less grip on the tires, because annoyingly,

he's doing much better than I was.

The value of this system is evident here.

Like, look at it going on.

Look at everything that's taking place here

to make this as realistic as you possibly can.

The structure there providing information to the driver

at incredibly low latency, three to four milliseconds,

all the grease movement, the massive screen,

everything taking place,

this is where the van has gone, and this,

if you look at that graph of how much you get,

how much money you spend,

this is right on the end of that graph.

That's how much money you have to get and spend

and develop to actually get something

as sophisticated as this.

Wow, there we go. Thank you.

Are there any parts of driving around the track

that particularly stood out for you?

I think I definitely struggled a little bit at first

with like the tighter corners

because that sense of speed is there, unlike at home,

and you go from hundreds of miles an hour,

down to like really slow speeds in a second on the brake.

So I definitely struggled with those tight hairpins.

But then after a few laps, just the feeling,

everything about this sim just made it feel

a lot more natural and I was able to get to grips of it.

How much do you reckon it would improve your driving?

I think it would help so much,

just in terms of learning the track,

learning the characteristics of the car,

then even setting up the car.

You can trial it in the sim

and then apply it to the real world

and I think that's where the market is,

and that's what's gonna be a game changer.

The things that strike me about this simulator

is that it is really is super realistic.

You really do feel like you're driving.

Yes, it's massively expensive,

but the value here is the money's all in that machine there.

So yes, it costs millions,

but the experience is priceless, really.

[gentle music]

So testing over, and what have we learned?

Well, we've learned that luxury tech is very expensive.

That's hardly a surprise.

But the difference between the Prodrive and the Dynisma

is that Prodrive is going for aesthetic

over all else, really.

Dynisma is really trying to push the boundaries forward.

Go back to that Venn diagram. Design, money, innovation,

Prodrive does two of those. Dynisma does all three.

And that's what makes it the best in the world.