Never mind a version of Gran Turismo for PSP as the ultimate hand-held driving simulator, the guys at Metra Electronics have gone several steps better by allowing you to drive a real car using your PSP!

Yes, you read that correctly. Metra have taken a 1994 Honda Civic and allowed it to be controlled using a PSP’s WiFi connection! The car has been refitted with enough electronics to sink a battleship. The engine has been replaced by an electric motor, and the steering wheel replaced by an analogue joystick and touch panel screen, which you can try out here. In total there are 21 TV screens in the car, being fed by 6 DVD players and 2 cameras, the images from which can be routed to any of the screens using the touch panel.


The PSP controls can be used to drive the car, allowing for steering, acceleration, brake, operating the lights and indicators, honking the horn and even opening the doors! At the moment this makes it more of a remote control, but it is planned to stream the video feed from the car mounted cameras to the PSP screen to allow it to be driven from inside the car.

The best part is that all this has been made possible due to the PSP homebrew scene. The PSP is simply running the homebrew LUA player, allowing control of the car to be done using a simple LUA script. I wouldn’t be surprised if the biggest hurdle in all this was getting the LUA player working on a stock PSP than anything to do with actually controlling the car.

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