The Deceptively Tricky Art of Designing a Steering Wheel

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.

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.

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 intricacies of the ergonomics, the logic of the switches, factoring in an “exploding element in the center" (the airbag), which is getting more and more complicated, says Wunderlich. “Even the rim is an ergonomic science in itself,” he adds, saying that his team works hand in glove with Mercedes' in-house ergonomics department on these stages. “It's almost 50-50. We get requirements data from engineering and ergonomics.”

Spinning Out

Look closely at your steering wheel rim; in cross-section, it won't be round. Cut it into segments, and each will likely have a different profile, aiming to optimize grip wherever your hands grasp the wheel. Even the padding has to be just right. “It mustn't be like bone but also not too fat. You need a nice balance,” Wunderlich says. “[It must say] this car is solid, it's quality, it's strong, it's powerful, but it's not crude.”

“If you hold the wheel on the three and nine o’clock positions, you can carve in with your fingers on the rear of the rim—so you have the hump, the scallop of the rim,” Wunderlich says. “And then we carve into a valley where your fingers could rest. That means your hands can close. You have the feeling you're holding the car. This is so challenging, because in that area you have such a technical structure to maintain—complex electronics and heating elements. We torture the engineers to keep that area so small so we can sculpt it out.”

Ive tortured Raffaele De Simone, Ferrari's chief engineer and head development driver. De Simone is sometimes described at the company as “Customer No. 1” because, apparently, no Ferrari road car leaves the factory until he is satisfied with its performance.

One of LoveFrom's primary design ideas for the Ferrari's Luce wheel was dual button modules on the wheel.

"He's an amazing driver," Ive says, “and he's also a remarkable engineer. So Raffa understands the first principles of use, but he also understands why he wants to use something, the way he wants to use it.” The LoveFrom team set De Simone to work in simulators and on the track, testing out Ferrari's Luce steering wheel design. “You can obviously measure the efficiency of different solutions in a simulator and then on track,” Ive says. “But then you must listen very, very carefully to someone with Raffa's instincts. There's so much that is important about what is right that you can't easily measure. We balance both. There is an understanding, a point of reference that's important; a sense of this feels right.”

Interestingly, Ive confides that, after much consideration of the problems to solve, LoveFrom's very first steering wheel design for Ferrari, including its flattened bottom, is actually remarkably close to the final production design revealed in San Francisco in February. What did require multiple iterations, tweaks, and input from De Simone, however, were the buttons. It required a unique solution.

“One of the things that we found really surprising is how many controls demand that you look at them in current solutions,” Ive says. “So one of the primary considerations was to make sure that you could feel where the buttons are.” The answer lay in what Ive calls one of the “big, founding ideas” of the Ferrari wheel design: dual self-contained button modules on the wheel. While these modules mustn't undermine or distract from the purity of the three-spoke design, Ive and the team determined that all the physical buttons had to have a distinct form, a distinct movement, and distinct feedback—to ensure you can operate them without looking down.

Audi's new Concept C interior features the brand's latest steering wheel, which will become the template for all the brand's models going forward.

“A lot of work was the intellectual architecting of these controls and what we want to group in this way, drawing on our experience, some of the most remarkable mechanical engineers [we have] who understand mechanisms and the tactile information you derive from them,” Ive says.

Indeed, LoveFrom's sterling work with the Luce's buttons seems to have inspired Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna to change the brand's entire approach to steering wheels. Vigna has confessed that touch-capacitive buttons cost 50 percent less to make than physical ones, calling them a “supplier’s advantage” rather than a driver’s. As a result, Ferrari is not only returning to physical switchgear for the coming Luce and Amalfi models, it's also offering a steering wheel retrofit for Purosangue and 12Cilindri owners to swap frustrating haptic pads for real buttons.

Marwan Khiat, interior design leader at Audi's Studio 2, was part of the team tasked with creating the steering wheel for the Concept C, a two-seat all-electric sports car design statement scheduled to arrive as a production car perhaps as soon as 2027. It supposedly embodies the new aesthetic philosophy for the brand, and its steering wheel is the blueprint for the CEO's wish to ditch the 100 versions Audi currently produces, and instead have one ring to rule them all.

“Going back to tangible buttons with feedback, we recognize the mistake of haptic buttons in the wheel doesn't work,” Khiat says. “When the iPhone came, it started the trend. Everybody was thinking, OK, this is the best solution. The money came to the table, of course. Designers thought this is the future, and because it's cheaper, let's go for it.”

The new C wheel is here to fix this mistake. A seemingly simple, completely circular design with integrated metal switchgear that can act as a base, Khiat says, for all models going forward. “It can fit from the concept C to the Q8, going to the A4, and so on. If you drive an Audi, from small to flagship, you need to feel that you have the same product and the same treatment. This is very important.”

BMW's new steering wheel for the i3 and iX3 bucks conventions and has wheel spokes at 12 and 6 o'clock, only possible because of Panoramic iDrive, a separate windscreen display showing driving data.

BMW's new steering wheel, accompanying its all-new Neue Klasse platform underpinning the iX3 and the 2026 i3, is trying to be a little more radical, and it's had a mixed reception. The designers, who went through 20 versions of the wheel before the final form, have surprisingly shunned the trend of moving back to physical switches and instead stuck with haptic buttons. They've also completely changed where the spokes are placed.

Thanks to BMW's new Panoramic iDrive, a clever thin display running across the entire bottom of the windscreen showing driving data including speed and navigation, the company has decided it can bin the instrument binnacle altogether, and, just because it hasn't been done before, put the wheel spokes at 12 and 6 o'clock.

I've driven it and, aside from unsurprisingly not liking the haptic buttons, didn't find it the most comfortable solution. Nor was I convinced by the new spoke layout. As Peter Holderith at Motor 1 rightly points out: “Just because designers knew they could fill that space didn't mean they had to. Using what appears to be the same parts twice and flipping the steering wheel upside down is a confusing choice.”

At the Helm

The future of the steering wheel, at least as it exists now, is in question. What happens to it when the car no longer always needs a driver? With Mercedes-Benz's current Drive Pilot system, the wheel merely stays where it is when autonomy is activated, but companies are working on ways to make it fold away when not needed. In January, for example, Swedish company Autoliv revealed what it claims is the world's first foldable steering wheel.

Crucially, the folding wheel's airbag system adapts according to the car's mode. When the self-driving mode is enabled and the wheel is retracted, a separate passenger airbag in the instrument panel is enabled. But during manual driving, it'll use the airbag in the steering wheel hub in the event of a crash.

Swedish company Autoliv has created the world's first foldable steering wheel.

Whether we'll ever come to fully accept or feel comfortable in a car without a steering wheel remains to be seen. The idea of “direct manipulation,” where people feel most comfortable and in control when the interface they're using physically resembles the system they're affecting, hits hard in the world of steering wheels. It's no accident that toddlers placed in front of a toy steering wheel know what to do with it.

If the steering wheel really is the most important contact point in a car for humans, something will inevitably shift when it's taken away. The relationship between driver and machine—how much trust is extended in each direction, how much agency humans retain, how much the car thinks it knows best—will need to be reframed. Navigating this will require automotive design to stop being such an insular discipline and practice. Car designers will have to broaden their horizons.

“The cost of developing a new car is extraordinary—the tooling, the design time, the development time—and what that drives is incrementalism,” Ive says. “It's much easier to just gently evolve things that do not incur risk. And so you have an insular echo chamber where most of those guys would not spend time understanding how you, for example, use a camera. They are dealing with what are complex challenges but are constrained by self-imposed boundaries. And so that leads to this proliferation of multiple, multiple solutions that tend to be just iterations of form.”

The success of the Luce interior, evidenced by Ferrari's switchgear U-turn, could well see Ive and LoveFrom tasked with solving the problem of the disappearing steering wheel. “I think we learned a lot,” he says. “We're proud of the clarity that we have brought to what is a fairly complex and chaotic set of problems. And, in some ways, I think that's a reasonable definition of design.”