In the latest Transformers movie, there's a scene in which former lingerie model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley gracefully climbs out of a Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG as though she were gliding on air. For anyone who has driven an SLS, the scene is downright laughable: No one steps out of the car that smoothly. When the gullwing opens, you grip the side, lunge forward and cartwheel your body out of the low-slung cockpit. Okay, so movies are not always intended to be realistic. (Transformers is about an ancient race of transforming robots, after all, so the mechanics of a Mercedes seems like a small gripe.) But in modern video games, we expect authenticity. The whole idea of sophisticated driving games is that you can get behind the wheel of a $250,000 supercar like the SLS with the understanding that it's based on the real thing. The recently released Forza Motorsport 4 is one of the most impressive, and realistic, car games ever created. To make it that way, the developers at Turn 10 Studios spent thousands of hours capturing OEM data from hundreds of real-world cars and visiting tracks all over the world. We wanted to know just how close the virtual driving experience has come to the real thing. So we drove four cars—the SLS, the Cadillac CTS-V, the VW Golf GTI, and even a Lexus CT 200h—both in real life and in the game. In addition, we talked to the automakers and to John Wendl, content director at Turn 10 Studios.

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