More Awesome Than You!

This is simply frustrating. I haven't a clue why my sims must go outside to get to their garage which is connected to their house. This is getting especially bad, since there are some vampires on this lot. Any ideas?

You could delete the doors.   :P

One problem: the door they are using is the front door.

I tend to have the opposite problem in my game, tquite often they will go into the garage and out again when they come home from work, the same with visitors, totally ignoring the front door.  I think a lot depends on the position of the mailbox.  Maybe if you move that nearer to the garage doors, they might be more inclined to do what you want them to do.  Just an idea, probably won't work, but worth a try.  It's also down to where the doors are, because they have this weird habit of seeing things that are further away as nearer if they're directly above or below them as opposed to on the same floor but across the room.  Are they doing this directly after getting out of bed and if so, is the front-door directly below their bedroom?

Even if the garage is connected to the house - it is a separate place, with it's own door (which you can add or not - the garage door is added only if you put the extention garage floor).
 
The entrance and the exit to/from the garage is made only through the garage's door (existing or not), from the road side - that's why your sim go outside, in order to enter the car.

You can't put a normal door between the garage and the house, but you can put a wall around the extention of the garage, if it has a garage door.

May be you should write Maxis, and ask for a fix in their next patch...:).

If the garage is connected to the house itself, and you absolutely do not want pedestrian traffic attempting to go through the garage door, there are tricks you can do with Authorized Personnel Only to make sure they don't, like making the entrance to the garage through an "Archlock" or simply an archway, so APO blocks sims from leaving through the garage door, so they path out through the archway instead. The reason this happens at all is due to some oddities in sim-pathfinding.

It's not pedestrians that I'm concerned with; it's the residents. Here's my best at making a picture of the house. The D's are doors, and c's are the car.

--------------------------
I   ccccc   I                I
I   ccccc   I                I
I   ccccc   D               I
------------------D-------

The problem is that sims that I direct to use the car will go outside the front door, and through the garage door to get to the car, even though there is a door right there. I know there's not a blockage, because I can get them there with extensive use of "walk here."

See above. There isn't a blockage, so you have to CAUSE ONE. Otherwise the sim pathfinding algorithm is all screwy.

I reread your post. Now I get it. Thanks.