Evening.
Zhang Yan finished her day’s work, returned home, had a quick dinner, and then sat down at her computer, ready to drive.
Previously, many people had questioned online: “You spend all day driving to and from work, and then you come home at night and continue driving in a game? How addicted are you?”
Now Zhang Yan could confidently reply: “Yes, I’m that addicted!”
Of course, although she needed to concentrate while driving in “Safe and Civilized Driving,” Zhang Yan felt that driving in real life was work, while driving in the game was entertainment.
Although this might seem incredible to some people, players who had truly experienced the joy of “Safe and Civilized Driving” shared Zhang Yan’s sentiment.
“Today I’ll try driving a coach bus, and tomorrow I can work toward getting on the racetrack!”
Zhang Yan had found time to get her coach bus license, and her experience driving heavy trucks had helped her significantly.
Truth be told, driving a long-distance coach offered distinctly different pleasures compared to driving a heavy truck.
The joy of driving a heavy truck mainly came from controlling the trailer behind you. Since heavy trucks aimed to transport more cargo, the trailer would get longer and longer. Maneuvering such a long trailer around corners or backing into loading bays was definitely a skilled task.
Once you made a mistake, scraping against a utility pole or fire hydrant while turning was actually the better outcome—you’d just pay for damages and be done with it. But if you got stuck turning on a mountain road, you were completely screwed. The rescue services in the game weren’t cheap.
But the longer the trailer behind you, the more cargo you could haul, and the greater the sense of achievement when delivering that cargo to its destination!
Long-distance coaches offered a completely different kind of enjoyment, allowing players to fully utilize the functions of the control panel included in the game package.
Unlike heavy trucks that simply transported goods between two points without needing to stop, long-distance coaches had multiple pickup and drop-off points along their routes. For example, during a one-hour journey, passengers would board and alight every ten minutes or so.
At these times, players had to execute the stopping, opening, and closing of doors themselves.
Furthermore, with heavy trucks, drivers only needed to focus on themselves, but with long-distance coaches, they had to pay attention to everyone on board.
Beyond stopping at stations and operating the doors, players also had to monitor conditions inside the coach, adjust the air conditioning temperature, and respond to emergencies when passengers pressed the stop button. This meant finding suitable places to stop. Additionally, players had to switch the movies playing onboard based on the age demographics of their passengers.
For instance, the movies played would naturally differ if most passengers were elderly or if most were children.
The evaluation rules in the game were different for coaches and trucks. For trucks, you just needed to deliver the cargo to its destination; if your vehicle was damaged or you violated traffic rules along the way, you’d be fined. The faster you delivered, the sooner you could start the next order.
But it wasn’t enough to simply transport coach passengers to their destination. Beyond issues of vehicle damage and traffic violations, there was also passenger satisfaction. Only when passenger satisfaction was relatively high could you earn a more generous payment.
Journey time, promptness in responding to passengers’ urgent requests, whether the cabin temperature was appropriate, smoothness of driving, whether the onboard movies matched passengers’ preferences… all these factors affected passenger satisfaction, which in turn affected final income.
Initially, Zhang Yan found this very frustrating, thinking these were just a bunch of unreasonable people!
She had safely delivered them to their destination, but because the movie didn’t match their preferences and the air conditioning was too cold, they lowered their ratings, reducing her final income. It was simply outrageous!
However, after several trips, Zhang Yan started to appreciate this design, as it added more challenges to driving long-distance coaches.
Moreover, the feeling of perfectly handling various emergencies and achieving high satisfaction ratings was extremely satisfying, especially when seeing her earnings increase by 20%, 30%, or even more for a single trip.
After several days of consistent streaming and building momentum, the number of viewers in Zhang Yan’s livestream room had swelled to tens of thousands.
It’s worth noting that these were real numbers on Rabbit Tail Streaming, genuinely tens of thousands of people, a completely different concept from the inflated viewership figures on other platforms.
The danmu comments had clearly become more dense.
“Wow, last time I watched you were driving a Passat, and now after just a few days you’re already driving a coach bus?”
“Your driving skills have visibly improved! Hard work pays off—you’re truly a role model for female drivers!”
“I remember your first day streaming—my goodness, you had a chain collision in the tutorial, then crashed the Passat again. I’m just wondering how many sisters the protagonist has to use up like this.”
“Stop the unfair criticism. The streamer has been performing very well—zero accidents for the past two days.”
“Watching the streamer drive a long-haul truck gives me a strangely reassuring feeling. If you’re bored, why not play some music, a comedy sketch, or an audiobook? That would be real enjoyment.”
“Has the streamer seen IIAS’s crash test yet? It’s a perfect recreation! If you haven’t seen it, go check it out quickly. That Passat incident wasn’t your fault!”
Seeing all the danmu comments praising her driving skills, Zhang Yan couldn’t help feeling a little proud.
Of course, she didn’t become complacent, knowing full well that these viewers had unconsciously lowered their standards because she was a female streamer and a female driver. If a male streamer had driven the way she did, he certainly wouldn’t have received so much praise.
So she still needed to continue working hard and improving her driving skills!
Zhang Yan decided that once she got tired of long-distance coaches and had saved enough money, she would try to get a racing license and formally learn professional knowledge like drifting, racing lines, downshifting and throttle control.
Because true driving masters were forged on the racetrack, and the most lucrative aspect of “Safe and Civilized Driving” was also on the track.
Long-distance coaches and heavy trucks earned money through transportation jobs. Although the specific income fluctuated, the upper limit was fixed.
Only circuit racing and rally racing offered high prize money and sponsorships—that’s what real money-making looked like!
Other streamers might have become complacent at this point, thinking it wasn’t bad to just drive ride-share vehicles, long-distance coaches, and heavy trucks every day. Taking it easy seemed fine. After all, the learning curve for racing was too steep, requiring enormous effort before seeing any results.
But Zhang Yan kept a clear head, not letting the praise go to her head, and instead chose to keep moving forward.
However, that last comment caught Zhang Yan’s attention.
“The IIAS crash test results are out?”
After completing her long-distance trip, Zhang Yan didn’t start another mission but instead found the IIAS crash test video on the AiLiDao website.
Previously, after her terrible Passat crash, she had searched online and found that there was significant controversy about the incident.
Many people felt that the Passat shouldn’t have performed so poorly!
Zhang Yan had crashed into a heavy truck, and the rear of heavy trucks in the game all had underride guards, making it a very standard 25% offset collision. Yet the results were so poor that it was hard for people to accept.
So quite a few people claimed that “Safe and Civilized Driving” was obviously smearing the car’s reputation.
Some even suggested that perhaps the game developers had been refused licensing by the manufacturer and decided to take revenge by portraying the car negatively in the game.
An important piece of evidence cited by these supporters was that the American version of the Passat had already undergone testing and received excellent ratings across the board.
How could the domestically produced joint-venture version be so drastically downgraded?
After an entire weekend of online debates, today the IIAS crash test results were finally released!
Zhang Yan clicked to watch the video.
A 25% offset collision: wheel collapse, A-pillar bending, cabin intrusion, steering wheel displacement, and the airbag perfectly “escaping” to the passenger side—avoiding the dummy’s head and allowing it to make intimate contact with the vehicle body…
After watching this video, Zhang Yan was stunned.
“Is… is this really not a death replay from the game? It’s exactly the same!”
At this moment, it was just like that previous moment.
Zhang Yan couldn’t help but wonder: How could they be so similar?
Of course, it was impossible for every detail to be identical, but the similarities in key issues were uncanny, such as the degree of A-pillar bending, the extent of front wheel intrusion into the cabin, and steering wheel drift.
Looking at the danmu comments and reviews for this video, it was clear that people were completely stunned.
“Damn, this is a world-class painting!”
“A-pillar folding technology! Extra-large energy absorption area! Safe rear seats! Door metal doesn’t move an inch!”
“I’m shocked. Can they really cut corners to this extent?”
“The American version got excellent ratings across the board! But the domestic joint-venture version just set two of IIAS’s worst records? The only car model in history to receive a ‘poor’ rating for head and neck injuries, and the only sedan in history to receive a ‘poor’ rating for frontal collision? What the hell! Are you trying to break records here?”
“Reverse record-breaking, impressive!”
“This amazing steering wheel and airbag drift left the driver’s head and neck completely unprotected. It’s lucky that IIAS’s lowest rating is just ‘poor’—in reality, this thing would have resulted in instant death!”
“Airbag: You noob, you still managed to crash. You deserve to die. I’m out of here, going to protect the passenger instead!”
“I declare that ‘Safe and Civilized Driving’ is operating on a whole other level. This is too mystical! Do they have a fortune teller in there? How could they predict this?”
“I heard it’s because the game uses an extremely realistic physics engine? Unlike other racing games, it individually models the physics effects for each structure and component of the car, so each vehicle behaves differently after a collision.”
“But that doesn’t make sense. How did they know the structural strength of each component in the new Passat in real life?”
“Did they pay out of their own pockets to crash test all these cars?”
“I believe Tenda is capable of doing something like that.”
“Actually, no. After all, they were busy developing the game, and crash testing is a fairly specialized field that Tenda hasn’t ventured into yet. It’s said that the data in ‘Safe and Civilized Driving’ was obtained through internal cooperation with IIAS, since this data would eventually be made public anyway.”