This paper describes the activities carried out during the first year of a research project aimed at developing a diagnostic tool, which should be able to prevent dangerous driving conditions, on the basis of the correlation between the driver level of attention and the vehicle motion conditions. To this aim a fixed base driving simulator has been developed, which allows to record the driver inputs on the steering wheel and on the pedals together with all the parameters related to vehicle dynamics, such as the longitudinal and lateral speed and acceleration, the pitch and roll angles, etc.. The simulator is based on a LAN which connects four PCs, two of which are dedicated to the simulation of vehicle dynamics and two to the generation and updating of the graphical scenario. The simulator is currently used to collect significant data during simulated driving tests; the data will be used in order to develop algorithms able to learn and monitor the driving style. In the paper the hardware and software components of the simulator are described; an example of different driving styles, as obtained with two drivers, is also discussed.