Steering wheel to stay, says Benz

Autonomous cars from Mercedes-Benz will never completely ditch their steering wheels, says the German car-maker's development chief. They’ve tried that once before, he said, and it didn’t go over so well.

Even in the age of the PlayStation generation, joysticks and computer- or console-style controllers won’t replace the conventional steering wheel of a modern car, Mercedes-Benz’s board member in charge of development, Dr Thomas Weber, said.

“We won’t do autonomous cars without steering wheels. There will always be a steering wheel,” he insisted.

The reason he’s so insistent is that Mercedes-Benz learned a valuable lesson from its joystick-controlled F200 concept car from 1996.

That car, which previewed the S-Class Coupe, had twin joysticks that could be used by either the 'driver' or the passenger, but it wasn’t alone. Saab had a concept version of the 9000, dubbed the Prometheus, in the early 1990s and Toyota put joystick in its FT-EV II and i-Real concepts as recently as 2009.

While a retractable joystick seems, on the surface, to be an efficient, space-maximising alternative to a steering wheel (and one with pretty obvious crash-safety advantages), people just didn’t like it.

“We under-estimated the emotional impact of the steering wheel there,” Dr Weber admitted. “That’s why we never went to joysticks.

“That’s one of the big issues with autonomous cars, actually. It’s like skiing. When you go up, you use a lift, but you don’t want an autopilot to come down, when it’s fun.”