I don't know how outdated this topic is, but I feel for the longest time controlling vehicles with KBM is a mostly awkward affair where accelerating a vehicle requires tapping forward to get a middling or low speed, and steering the same way, just tap tap tap so you don't oversteer. I'm sure some games have their own method, like Saints Row just giving you a cruise control button, but that really feels like some weird stop gap because with 1 and 2, you used A to do the same thing, and I'm pretty sure it was really just to make drive-bys easier, because the games also allowed analog stick acceleration which mostly works in spite of the wonky driving physics. I heard the Splinter Cell games utilize the mouse wheel to control how fast or slow you go, which I feel would also work for driving with keyboard and mouse, but depends on how the driving is set up. And I'm speaking with a standard KBM, one with digital keys not one of those fancy once with the analog keys.

Have you played any games that solve this problem?

I've been playing different racing games on PC DOS machine using keyboard as my main input controller. Almost everytime they sucked at controlling the steering wheel. Some games had settings for mouse control, in a way it was much better since you could turn a wheel for different angles but without the keyboard driving on mouse only was an uncomfortable experience. I never understood why it was so hard to *invent* a simple keyboard + mouse approach with addition of extra buttons (e.g. Ctrl or Shift) to limit gas pedal pressing & steering wheel turning speed. And I was a little kid back then, so perhaps it was super hard to implement if big guys from the industry were not going to please me with just that.

I had to apply the *tap-tap-pause-quick tap-tap-tap* method in Need for Speed, Midnight Club and later on in Re-Volt games to perfect my turns on high speed and it helped a lot, some players were unaware of such tactic for some reason and were eager to lose as a result.

Anyway I disliked the experience of playing any type of driving games using keyboard. I can't say I loved playing those on gamepad or joystick, or even the wheel controller (I expected better experience I guess). So I stopped playing driving games many years ago. I watched some videos where cool kids with pro-driving controllers with wheel and pedals played some Formula 1 and Rally games and they seem to do very well. The only 2 games where I really enjoyed driving cars in first person perspective using only keyboard and mouse: are GTA 5 and Mafia 3. It was almost like driving real car, great immersion, beleivable steering physics. The feedback from the game was very close the real one.

Yeah, reminds me of Indy500 when i played it... Same problems.

Keyboards are digital and you're not going to get an analogue response from something like the IBM Model M whose buckling spring has only two states.

I, on the other hand, didn't like driving with keyboard and mouse in Mafia 3 at all.
Therefore, I had my Xbox360 controller sitting in my lap, and whenever I entered a car, I picked up the controller and steered with that.
Worked like a charm.

Eh, it can be mastered quite well, if you put in the time of course. Never drove on anything else than KB + M, and did absolutely fine every time. But I play mostly arcade racers, no realistic ones.

Same with platformers (both 2D and 3D) or 3rd person games, like Souls games. Most people seem to consider a controller an absolute necessity. I keep wondering why.

But as far as solutions go, I've seen some games where the vehicle you are steering follows the center of the camera, so you can get analog steering (not speed though). But it usually sucks anyway, because you lose track of what's ahead of you in sharp turns. I disable it whenever possible.

I started playing racing games with a digital controller, so no .. I never had this problem.
Also modern analog arcade racing games like Horizon Chase Turbo I play much better with digital controls.

But this is valid mostly for arcade games. In a real cockpit perspective game which is made for steering wheels, it's not even worth the try to use the keyboard.