Motor Skills on the Skids : Drunk driving: A special car shows Sylmar High students how alcohol can make a killer.

More than 200 Sylmar High School students got a sobering, hands-on lesson Wednesday in the disastrous effects of combining alcohol and automobiles, experiencing how driving after a few drinks could massacre helpless victims.

One by one, teen-agers slid behind the wheel of a specially equipped car that simulates drunk driving--and watched themselves scatter pylons and run over pop-up plastic human silhouettes as the drivers wound erratically through a winding, circular course set up in one of the school’s parking lots.

“I killed the poor kid,” said 16-year-old Isaac Cetto with a shake of his head after he surveyed the plastic carnage behind him, including a supine pedestrian silhouette. “I really annihilated a couple things.”

The demonstration, part of Sylmar’s drunk-driving awareness day, was brought to the students by the Dodge Division of Chrysler Corp. and the Los Angeles County chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Since 1988, Dodge employees have toured high schools across the country with a special car to drive home the message of its “TH!NK . . . Don’t Drive and Drink!” campaign.

The simulator made a stop at Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles on Tuesday before arriving at Sylmar, the only school in the San Fernando Valley ever to hold the demonstration.

The sleek, red 1991 Dodge houses a computer that simulates drunk driving by delaying the car’s steering and braking response time to match the slowed reactions of a driver under the influence of alcohol.

An instructor, who sits on the passenger side and controls an independent brake, enters into the computer the driver’s weight and a certain number of drinks--each equivalent to about one ounce of whiskey. The computer figures the delay in reaction time that the alcohol would cause.

The 100 drivers, who each carried one student passenger, had to go at least 15 m.p.h. and try to stop before passing plastic human silhouettes that popped up at points beside the route. Stopping alongside the silhouette, or plowing past it altogether, counted as a “hit.”

For Isaac, a strapping, 220-pound junior who earned his driver’s license a few months ago, six imaginary swigs vaulted his supposed blood-alcohol content past California’s legal limit of .08 to somewhere above .09.

His first circuit of the curving course resulted in only a few downed pylons and some spectator snickers. As “intoxication” seeped in on the second lap, he swerved around corners, sent pylons flying and couldn’t slam on the brakes in time to avoid “killing” two pedestrians.

“He killed ‘em all!” one boy shouted.

“Oh, man,” Isaac said incredulously, as he stumbled out of the simulator. “No wonder my dad doesn’t wanna give me a car.”

The demonstration was also eye-opening for Bernadette Martinez, a senior who was one of the day’s passengers.

“It surprises you,” she said after a particularly turbulent ride with friend Amber Byrne, who at one point wound up completely off the course. “You don’t think it’s going to be that way.”

Precisely, said Dodge instructor Tim Danforth. He said the simulator’s value lies in its ability to shock drivers with the reality of just how drastically drinking impairs driving.

“You can preach in the classroom all you want, and it’ll go in one ear and out the other,” Danforth said. “But you get them out there to experience just what it’s like, and it sticks.”