Multifunction steering wheel, old hat
02/14/2020
In the 1980s, multifunction steering wheels, propagated by Rainer Buchmann and others, were all the rage; since then, they have become established slowly at first, then increasingly quickly. Today, you can hardly buy a car without some of the functions being operated via buttons on the steering wheel.
And yet additional functions on the steering wheel were already old hat in the 1980s. In the 1920s and 1930s (and for a few years after the war), car designers always liked to include controls on the steering wheel, usually on the hub with rotary levers.
And these were not just some incidental tasks that could be carried out in the center of the steering wheel (shown here on a Rolls-Royce Phantom I Ascot Tourer from 1930), but vital things. These levers could be used to advance or retard the ignition, depending on whether the engine was cold or warm, loaded or unloaded. Another lever allowed the carburetor mixture to be enriched, for example when driving at higher altitudes. And many cars also had a hand throttle adjustment device that allowed you to take your foot off the accelerator pedal, basically a simple version of cruise control.
Anyone who was not able to use these levers well was hardly one of the most efficient and fastest chauffeurs ...
