Three dents in the steering wheel instead of one in the head
Safety comes before beauty. At the end of the 1950s, a German company therefore introduced a special "safety steering wheel", the rim of which had three concave segments, into each of which a spoke ended. The idea behind it: In the event of an accident, the inwardly curved sections should bulge outwards and thus absorb more impact energy than the circular rim of a conventional steering wheel.
The principle even worked: in a 1959 test with four different steering wheel designs, Road & Track found that the force acting on the driver was only half that of a regular steering wheel with a recessed hub. The steering wheel with the dents could therefore have set a precedent. But then the safety steering column came along and steering wheels could be simple circles again.
