Pacoima : Teaching Students a Sobering Lesson

Seventeen-year-old Rudy Romero had just downed a six-pack of beer, and he was feeling bad.

He climbed behind the wheel of a white Dodge-Plymouth Neon and took a ride downtown. So what if he veered off the road several times? So what if he plowed through a few pedestrians?

After all, it was just an exercise. A sobering one, Rudy said.

“It was cool,” said Rudy, one of about 40 students from San Fernando High School who took a spin in a drunk-driving simulator vehicle at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.

“I weigh like 200 pounds, and they punched my weight into in the computer” inside the car, supplied by Chrysler Corp. and sponsored by Mothers Against Drunk Driving. “Then they programmed that I had drunk a whole six-pack, and then I drove. But suddenly, it gets really hard to drive. Everything gets delayed, the steering, the braking. And these paper people kept popping up. I knocked everything down.”

The point was to demonstrate to the teens the impaired response and reflexes of people who drive under the influence of alcohol, said Jerry Barnhart, crew chief of the drunk-driving simulator.

According to statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, about 7,245 drivers ages 16 to 20 died in alcohol-related crashes in 1993. Male drivers are three times more likely to be involved in an alcohol-related fatal crash than females, according to the administration.

On Wednesday, a figure-eight driving course was marked by orange pylons in a parking lot at the museum. A driving instructor sat in the passenger seat while teens took turns at the wheel. The instructor programmed a computer with the driver’s weight and a number of alcoholic beverages, and the car’s controls were affected accordingly.

“It showed me you can’t really drive when you’re drunk,” Rudy said.