There are now at least two new vehicles that haven’t got steering wheels. As in round steering wheels. Instead, they are flattened round; something like that. Part circle, part square. It makes steering the car attached to it feel very strange because more than modest canting – of the flattened round wheel – beyond the nearly centered position results in a feeling like driving on square wheels. The leverage situation changes and you must learn to adjust to them. It is not natural and it is for no good reason.
The 2026 Lincoln Navigator has one of these flattened round steering wheels and so does Subaru’s new EV, which it calls the Uncharted. Which isn’t a noun or a number and that is “uncharted.” Maybe it is part of a new vehicle naming tend. How about the BMW Unboxed? The Chevy Topographical? 
Anyhow, the idea behind the flattened round seems to be to impart some styling ginger to these vehicles, which increasingly look the same inside now, due to the lemmings-off-the-cliff Me Too’ing of LCD touchscreens replacing what used to be instrument clusters. The entire dash is becoming nothing more than a place to mount these touchscreens, which get bigger with each new model year. Some new vehicles – like the Navigator – have screens that encompass the entire width of the dashboard and the problem is these screens all look basically the same. So maybe a designer thought: Hey, we can make the steering wheel look different! Let’s put the rim in a vise and crush it a little, so as to flatten it on two sides.
That will look different!
And it does. For now. Until every other brand decides to do the same flattening of their wheels, at which point they’ll all look the same again. 
Airbags are, of course, to blame for all of this. The federal mandate that decrees all new vehicles must have driver (and passenger) air bags caused all steering wheels to look the same beginning when this mandate went into effect 30-something years ago. Before this time, steering wheels looked different to such an extent you could quickly identify the make (and even the model) just by looking at the steering wheel. It was – once – a central design element and many vehicle manufacturers put a lot of work into designing steering wheels that became the centerpiece of the car’s interior. 
One of the most recognizable – and iconic – example being the Formula wheels Pontiac installed in GTOs and Firebirds back in the ’70s. The Chevy Camaro – sister of the Firebird – had its own Camaro-specific wheel, with different spokes and a different horn button. There are many other such examples.
Interestingly, they all had round rims. This was because designer’s attention could be focused on the hub and the spokes and that was because there was as yet no federal requirement to stuff an air bag in the hub. This requirement made every air-bag-equipped car’s steering wheel hub look like it was stuffed with something – which it was (and is). And it made it effectively impossible to make a wheel with a horn cap, which used to be the piece d’ resistance of a steering wheel. 
Some of those pre-air-bag had smaller (or larger) diameter rims and some were thicker (or thinner) but all of them were round because round makes sense. Flattened round doesn’t. To appreciate why it doesn’t, find a road with a series of curves and try taking those curves at a speed faster than a crawl in a vehicle with a flattened-round rim. Hand-over-hand steering such a vehicle is an interesting experience.
Of course, you’re not supposed to drive that way today. You are supposed to drive safely – which means always going slowly. Only a dangerous driver would ever need to turn the wheel more than a little while driving, the theory has it.
But how about when maneuvering the vehicle at low speed, as when negotiating your way in and out of a parking spot at a busy shopping mall? Then you will find you need to turn the wheel more than a quarter-turn and when you do, you will feel this weird non-linear steering effect as you transition from the round part of the wheel to the part that’s been flattened.
But at least it looks different than the LCD touchscreen that’s in front of you.
PS: Subaru’s new EV – the Uncharted – will sticker for only $37,000 to start. That’s about $10k more to start than the almost-exactly-the-same size Crosstrek (which isn’t an EV) that weighs 1,000 lbs. less and can be driven about 200 miles farther before it runs out of gas. The Uncharted is also front-wheel-drive, unless you pay $41,245 for the Sport – which can only go 270 miles before it runs out charge.
Uncharted territory, indeed!
. . .
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We probably have more “designers” (not just vehicle design) in the world than ever before, but some of the worst designed things in recent memory.
Watching a HDTV show as I write this as a “designer” destroys a nice looking house in the name of “updating” it.
Aircraft yokes aren’t round, but then they don’t need to rotate more than +/-90 degrees either.
There is such a thing as a mature technology, messing with auto steering wheels is dumb. And possibly dangerous.
A very interesting article By Jim Quinn of The Burning Platform:
You Can’t Fix Stupid
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/12/jim-quinn/you-cant-fix-stupid/
Wow Big J…
Excellent article.
I remember while “doing a consulting tour” in Orblando FL (2006/7)…
The payroll manager calls and says —– I can’t figure out what’s wrong with your paycheck..
“Oh , check the 401k percentage deduction %”…..”OOhhh 40% of your Gross…WOW!!!”
Some people save “for a Rainey day”, others a monsoon season…
I’m insecure thus trying to have enough for the next Ice Age.
Steering wheels are round because they’ve always been round. But they weren’t always round or even always present. The first cars worked with levers, like driving a skid steer now. But a wheel was easier to use once recirculating ball boxes and steering rods improved and the Ackermann geometry was mechanically reliable. And they were still huge for leverage before power steering. Over time different ways developed. Formula one and Indy have video game looking things. They don’t need to turn much more than a 20 degrees so 250, 300 degrees of wheel is pointless. With high ratio and electric assist a 360 degree wheel is unnecessary, you don’t need to hand-over-hand to maneuver in tight spots and don’t need the leverage. It’s tilting at windmills. Same as people who bought touch tone phones with the numbers put in a circle like a rotary dial. It’s comfortable and familiar. Whether we need the new technology is a matter of debate. The way things were done in a 1960s Impala weren’t because they knew they stumbled on some ideal. It was just one waypoint in technological evolution. An electric-assist rack-and-pinion has advantages, less slop, less vagueness. Best-or-worse is a relative decision of the user. I’ve driven cars made as old as 1955 and new as 2016. I don’t hate the steering on my daughter’s 2016 Subaru (electric). It reacts VERY quickly compared to every hydraulic assist I’ve ever driven. Her car has none of the driver assist tech, no lane departure stuff. That stuff is one reason for electric assist but not the only one. The speed fully electronic reacts compared to analog or electro-mechanical is another.
I prefer the rack-and-pinion on my 2014 daily driver Tacoma with IFS over the recirc ball and track-width length linkage pull-pull on my solid axle 1985 project. At least on the highway and in normal stuff. On trails, yeah, the 1985 is reliable and doesn’t get knocked out of alignment. But it’s also quite exactly *in* alignment either. It always sort of has a feeling of you’re only really suggesting a direction in the lane and pot holes and bumps yield major changes in what input you need to use to get back on your original aim point. I don’t think there’s is one unified “perfect” anything.
I like some of the simplicity of that 1985 but at 60 now I’m soft and see no reason to punish my rear end when a better alternative exists. But you could not have built the 1985 using rack-and-pinion even if they wanted to. A solid axle front end moves around too much.
Nothing technological happens in a vacuum, changes to one thing ripple to further changes elsewhere.
I saw a EV Hummer yesterday. I still do not know what to think.
Am I supposed to believe the turd burglar driving loves the environment or that they are giving the middle finger to EVs by driving a land tank.
It was 6 degrees yesterday. I imagine that big battery was powering a lot of heating elements to heat the cabin. Meanwhile my truck makes heat as a byproduct of internal combustion. My crew cab is still smaller inside than that hummer which means my heat is better because I dont lose range running the heat and fan at maximum.
But what do I know? I bet the guy is leasing it.
That’s just it. In the days of yore, steering wheels were larger, and power steering, largely seen as a unnecessary luxury, most for “frail” folk that didn’t typically drive anyway, simply wasn’t needed. The simple principle of LEVERAGE was all that was necessary. Also, as Tony of “Uncle Tony’s Garage” has put it, prior to about 1960 or so, most American motorists drove about in a “fifty MPH” world, as the Interstates were only in the beginning phases of construction by then. Styling changes necessitated smaller steering wheels, and also the greater participation of women made the assistance rendered by powering steering far more necessary.
Non-“Wheels” have certainly been used on other vehicles. One might note that on the German “Big Cats” tanks (Tigers I and II and Panther), the “wheel” is cut off at the top and bottom of the circle. The reason was, even though for a tank, they had a quite “light touch”, the feature of that steering system, based on the British Merritt-Brown design, was a “hard spot” at fifteen to thirty degrees from TDC. Under stress, the driver could simply use his palms to push on the “wheel”, and in most cases, quickly turning more than that risked throwing a track, which for those very heavy (for the time) tanks, would have been disastrous in a combat situation.
I see that screen mounted like that it’s tempting to rip it out and throw it out the window! What a design abomination.
Wish me luck, the replacement touchscreen for the Grand Cherokee arrived yesterday. I need to rewatch the how to video several times. First step is pulling the plastic dash surround without breaking it. Luckily the video also includes that first step.
A girl on our street got her a new Uncharted, and her next-door neighbor got a new Incapacitated. So, to keep up, the guy across the street bought himself a new Emasculated.
Dear lord, I think I need to get Intoxicated…
Sadly Ernie I don’t think there’s enough alcohol to make that thing look good.
‘Airbags are, of course, to blame for all of this.’ — eric
Airbags — more accurately, gas bags — are the primary culprit. But they had an accomplice: the ludicrous ‘pop tart’ douchescreen in the lede photo, resembling a child’s etch-a-sketch plastered with brightly-colored phone icons (ages 4-6).
When refined taste degenerates into kitsch, in a process that the late Paul Fussell called ‘prole drift,’ everything else including the perfectly round, perfectly tasteful and perfectly functional steering wheel of old gets degraded too. Gauges get defaced also, as in BMW’s lozenge-shaped instrument panel, designed by square-headed proto-humans clad in crudely-fashioned animal pelts.
We all know where this leads: buy a new Subie, get a gift certificate for five hundred dollahs worth of free tattoos. There’s a
suckerslob born every minute.That is one ugly looking steering wheel. How ironic and appropriate.
Is anyone asking for this feature? I mean, I guess it might help with seeing the instrument cluster, or let you adjust it lower and not hit your thighs, but has that been a problem?
I think it’s more about getting you into the mindset of letting the car drive itself. The manual controls are only there in case of emergency (or dirty windshield).
Lets reinvent the wheel, not surprising Suckeroo came up with this idea. The drivers of these cars trend towards bad…
Speaking of turning the wheel quickly, my four wheel drive is on the fritz .. had to make it in a logging road to work. The road had about 40 cm of snow on it. With a trail of ruts from past passes. Needed to go a mile to the turn around spot , all up hill. Turned the traction control off and hit the trail at 80 km/hr ( that’s what the rear wheels were turning) the steering wheel got quite the work out. I got the adrenaline rush and the day in. Had to shovel some to get turned around. Tach was red lining and limiting the motor on the trip in.
Tach
Everyone thinks they’re a race car driver…
https://www.pegasusautoracing.com/productdetails.asp?RecID=26072
Morning, Mark!
Yup – and those F1-style wheels work in F1 cars because you don’t turn them much in an F1 car…
Blame the “F1” movie. Apple sold $600 million worth of tickets worldwide.
@Eric – While the accuracy is debatable, “F1” is not woke.