50 and more years of driving without a steering wheel
Around 20 years ago (1996), the Mercedes-Benz F 200 "Imagination" concept car stood at the Paris Motor Show and amazed onlookers because it lacked a steering wheel. Car developers had long before dispensed with the steering wheel. A Detroit Electric, for example, had no conventional steering wheel; the mechanism was more reminiscent of a bicycle.
Engineers really got going in the fifties and especially the sixties. The Automobil Revue devoted two whole pages to the developments at that time (1965).
Author Ernst Behrendt listed five reasons for replacing the familiar steering wheel: safety (no steering column that would dig into the driver's upper body in the event of an accident), a better view of the dashboard, unimagined design freedom and possibilities for interior design, easier operation and - get this - the smooth transition to the "electronic highway", i.e. autonomous driving. At that time, the idea was to drive behind each other on the road controlled by induction loops.
Ford and General Motors (later also Chrysler, in the picture the 300 X from 1966) were very active in developing alternatives to the conventional steering wheel and came up with a wide variety of solutions, the most promising of which was called "Unicontrol". This was a type of joystick that could be used to transmit not only the steering, but also braking and acceleration commands.
Neither the author of the article at the time believed that these solutions would be a success with customers. He concluded with the words: "Most of these designs are interesting. Some seem promising. However, none of them are likely to be mass-produced in the USA for the time being, because the public would only marvel at them, but not buy them, however much they could contribute to internal safety in the event of serious accidents. There seems to be only one possibility: that young people (the term is not only to be understood according to the year of birth) discover steering wheel-free steering, become enthusiastic about it and demand its installation in sports models. That would be the first breach in the front line of buyer resistance."
Interesting, isn't it? You would think that the Playstation generations would be able to make friends with innovative steering concepts, which, incidentally, have long been established in aircraft construction.
But even today, when the transmission of steering commands is increasingly being decoupled from track rods and the like, it is hard to imagine a replacement for the classic steering wheel. Joysticks or other user interfaces can still only be found in concept cars (e.g. Mercedes-Benz F 200 (picture above) or Rinspeed), while the normal car driver steers with a steering wheel that is no longer always round, but still classic. But perhaps the hotly debated "autonomous driving" will help steering wheel alternatives achieve a breakthrough at some point ...
