The Deceptively Tricky Art of Designing a Steering Wheel | WIRED

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Could you design a steering wheel? How hard could it be? A circle with some spokes. A central space for the airbag. Some buttons for adjusting volume or taking a call. Simple. Only it's not. It's very, very hard. Design veterans of the auto industry cite fashioning functional yet beautiful steering wheels as being one of the trickiest parts of car design.

It's also considered one of the most important components of any car. Why? Because it's the first thing you touch when entering the vehicle. It's the main emotional connection point you have as a fleshy human with the four-wheeled mechanical object in which you're sitting. Get it wrong, make it uncomfortable or difficult to use, and no amount of performance, leather upholstery, torque vectoring, or active aero will make amends.

This is precisely why, when designing a new car, automakers will often go through more than 20 iterations of steering wheel designs over several years, just to make sure they've landed in the right place and not kill their brand's new baby before it's even delivered. Sketches will be pored over, prototypes will be 3D-printed, cross sections will be analyzed and remolded.

Wheels in Motion

Right now, after 120 years or so of use, steering wheels are having something of a moment, for reasons both good and bad. Last month, after banning flush door handles, China announced that starting in January 2027, it will ban jet-fighter-style yoke steering wheels, like what's found in the Tesla Model S Plaid and Lexus RZ, amid fears that they pose an increased risk of injuring a driver in a crash.

At the end of 2025, Audi CEO Gernot Döllner, who has been at the helm of the car brand for two years, announced a directive to cut down on frivolous customization and picked out steering wheels as a main offender. "We believe that we only need three, maybe four different versions of a steering wheel. At the moment, we have over 100!” he told Auto Express.

3D-printing of steering wheels, like this example from Ford, is common at the prototyping design stage.

Courtesy of Ford

Finally, at the start of February, to much fanfare, Jony Ive revealed to the world what his team at LoveFrom has been crafting for Ferrari's first-ever electric vehicle. The beautiful Luce interior may be swathed in glass and aluminum, but the three-spoke steering wheel steals the show, reinterpreting iconic ’50s and ’60s wooden Nardi wheels. Weighing 400 grams less than a standard Ferrari wheel, it has physical switches set into two analog control modules, highlighting what we already know: The car industry, in a race to remove buttons, foolishly copied the wrong part of Apple's design. Thankfully, they're finally seeing the error of their ways.

Cars didn't always have steering wheels. The very first car—the 1885 Benz Patent-Motorwagen, invented by Karl Benz—used a tiller system: a horizontal bar with a handle mounted to a vertical bar. The lever-like handle was similar in many respects to a boat’s rudder. Amazingly, it would be another nine years before French engineer Alfred Vacheron saw sense and fitted the first known steering wheel to his 4-horsepower Panhard for the Paris-Rouen race. Just four years later, in 1898, Panhard made the infinitely preferable and safer steering wheel standard on all its cars. And we've been using them ever since.

Hans-Peter Wunderlich is Mercedes' creative director of interior design. He has been designing steering wheels for 35 years. “I started in 1991 on my first,” he tells me. “A steering wheel is really the most challenging and difficult element to sculpture, to design, to develop in the car.” It is so difficult that Wunderlich has used the wheel as a test on potential recruits.

“When we hire a designer, I have given them the task, after I see a nice portfolio, to draw me a steering wheel,” he says. “The steering wheel is, for me, the proof. Should I hire them or not? If a designer is able to create a perfect steering wheel, even just as a scribble, then they will be a good designer for the total interior of a car.”

CAD design renders of Mercedes and Maybach designs before prototyping.

Courtesy of Mercedes

It was this challenge, in part, that attracted Ive and his team. “Our starting point was trying to understand the essential nature of the problem to be solved, and that normally means dismissing received wisdom,” Ive tells me. “A car is the aggregation of multiple products, and, in many ways, we're designing furniture. We're designing complex and sophisticated input methods. One of the challenges was to try to create cohesion. You don't get something to be cohesive by a set of rules. That was a wonderful new challenge, and one wrestled with over a number of years.”

For both Ive and Wunderlich, science accompanies the art of design. They talk of the in