Like most everyone else who’s ever driven a vehicle, the folks at Ford know that sliding behind the wheel while under the influence of anything is a terrible idea, and the company is looking to drive that point home as part of its Ford Driving Skills for Life young-driver safety initiative. Henceforth, the program will include the use of a special suit designed to simulate the effects of a variety of drugs, to show teens in a practical way that driving a vehicle in such a state is no joke.
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Acting on a driver’s entire body, Ford’s getup has been dubbed the “Drugged Driving Suit,” although it isn’t so much a suit as a collection of bizarre attachments for the users’ wrists, ankles, knees, and head. Besides making the user look as if they’re wearing a last-minute Robocop halloween costume, the components can slow joint mobility, vibrate wrists to simulate hand tremors, and mimic degraded balance with weights unevenly distributed across extremities. The goggles distort the user’s vision while also flashing trippy-looking lights at their periphery; as if the visual stimulation weren’t enough, headphones also blast random noises modeled after hallucinative, imaginary noises. Far out.
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Ford claims the suit can be set up to fake the effects of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, LSD, and ecstasy. (It also can simulate with shocking accuracy the effects of wearing a bunch of weird attachments and looking ridiculous.) According to Ford, a significant number of young people admit to having operated a vehicle while high on drugs, an alarming problem it hopes to solve by sticking teens in the Drugged Driving Suit. As you could imagine, wearing the addenda makes driving pretty difficult. In case the powers of imagination elude you, Ford produced a video showing two young Germans attempting to drive through a course marked with traffic cones, walk, catch balls thrown at them, and even perform basic field sobriety tests. None of these tasks are performed with anything resembling alacrity. As they say, come for the safety message, stay for the German being hit with a large Bosu ball.
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Seems like a more effective teaching method than, say, rapt classroom discussion of the dangers of driving while high on drugs, no?
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