China’s largest vehicle manufacturer wants to be sole Chinese distributor for Ride The Wave’s innovative Driving Simulator

Granada, Spain – 14 September 2010 Ride The Wave (RTW) has announced that one of the world’s largest vehicle manufacturers, FAW of China, wants to have exclusive distribution rights for RTW’s innovative Driving Simulator in China. The company estimates that this will result in a demand for thousands of units per year to meet the growing need for teaching the Chinese population how to drive safely and effectively. RTW is at the forefront of using simulated environments to teach people how to drive and is creating the world’s first, low cost, mass production driving simulator called the Acceleron™.

FAW will be making the cabin for the simulator. “Once we fully understood how advanced the Acceleron is, we put in a formal request to be the sole distributor for China which is now going through due process,” explained Feng Ruyang, COO of FAW’s Import and Export division. “As the largest vehicle manufacturer in China we already have in place a national distribution network that can also be used to distribute and service the Acceleron. Millions of Chinese need to learn to drive. In 2009, a quarter of a million new drivers joined the streets of Beijing alone. There are just not enough driving instructors which is an additional reason why we see the Acceleron with its built-in teaching program and ultra realistic driving environment as being the ideal solution.”

Laurence Seidler, RTW’s CEO, added, “Simulation is a well proven method of teaching people but it needs to be realistic to be effective. Until now, driving simulators have had a very poor sense of realism. Thanks to being able to use the latest technological advances developed by ourselves, we have leapfrogged ahead to provide incredibly realistic, computer generated environments based on thousands of pictures of actual city streets that enables the total suspension of disbelief. The essence of great simulation is to replicate reality at a cost to the consumer that undercuts real world costs. The operator running cost for an hour learning to drive in an Acceleron is just the cost of the electricity which is a fraction of the costs of running a real car for that time with petrol, instructor, insurance etc. We see China, which is experiencing a growth of learner drivers that is greater and faster than the rest of the world put together, as our primary market. Per capita income is still low in China whilst the need to acquire this crucial life skill remains paramount. FAW and RTW see simulation as the high tech solution to low cost, mass tuition.”

Current driving lessons are simply designed to enable people to pass the driving test in an unrealistic environment. They cannot, for reasons of safety, allow the learner to encounter the dangers and challenging situations of driving in a real world such as heavy traffic, motorways, night driving, icy conditions, multilane roundabouts, driving on the other side of the road in other countries. Yet, once the learner driver has passed the test, they can legally be in charge of a car and encounter any of these situations with only a few hours driving experience behind them that has invariably only been on quiet suburban roads in the daytime. Really learning how to drive actually happens after the test has been passed.

Thanks to the economies of scale, the capital cost of an Acceleron is similar to that of a car used to teach learner drivers. It has three high definition screens that display the real time, computer generated environment of over 75 kilometers of drivable roads and motorway. Once inside the Acceleron, it is just like being in a real vehicle – advanced robotics give a full sense of movement, it has the correct car sounds including crunched gears, and the views out the windows are detailed and realistic. With fully functioning traffic flows and signals, pedestrians and vehicles coded with Artificial Intelligence to make decisions in real time, multiple weather and time options, the Acceleron learning experience is more complex than its real life counterpart. It provides Risk Free Reality to learn in where real life challenges can be experienced that a learner could never be exposed to in a real car and the correct responses taught so they become instinctive – in the same way that pilots learn how to fly a plane in all sorts of adverse conditions before flying a real plane.

About Ride The Wave www.ridethewave.es
Ride The Wave SL is a Spanish company based near Granada that has already received the commitment of R&D funding from the European Union. The Company is creating the Acceleron driving simulator that will enable learner drivers to really learn how to drive safely by experiencing the challenges that will be met in the real world in the safety of a highly realistic virtual world.
info@ridethewave.es

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