Discussion»Questions»History» From the time that cars were first invented, why wasn’t the steering wheel placed in the middle of the front seat instead of left or right?
That would require a car to be either a very roomy 3-seats wide or the driver being the only front-seat occupant. The former would make cars even wider than they have become; the latter would necessitate them being significantly longer for the same passenger and luggage capacity.
Also, the driver being at the side of the vehicle allowed hand-signals, though I don't know if anyone uses these now, relying entirely on the turn-indicator lamps.
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Difficult to see how cars are developing.
We've seen cars become more and more compact, not least for fuel efficiency (less mass to accelerate and keep moving) but also needing less garage, parking and road space. Yet larger saloon and estate cars have become wider, sometimes by using extended wheel-arches while giving with little extra interior room further cramped by exaggerated tapering upwards of the sides - to the extent many cannot be kept in domestic garages, and they create problems in public car-parks. (Particularly when their drivers can't or won't park centrally and parallel to the lines...)
Further, it has become fashionable, at least in Britain, to buy great big vans and ostentatious off-road 5-seat pick-ups, all very wide, to use merely as ordinary cars! Judging by my own street, especially if you live in a narrow Edwardian street of terraced houses where the only parking available is at the road-side.
An intriguing idea, tuning a 2+only nominal 2 into a 1+possibly 2, but the text makes it clear that is was a "special", a custom-car built for an individual, not a production vehicle.
Otherwise, motor- bi- and tri- cycles and racing-cars apart, the only production vehicles with central driving positions are agricultural, earth-moving and other industrial machines that are driver-only, without passenger seats; and may have reasons connected with their functions for that configuration.
I can think of only one production-car that was the exception to this; the 1+1 Messerschmidt 3-wheeler of the 1940s-50, and with an appearance that that gave rise to the myth that its upper bodywork was basically the upper half of the WW2, Me109 fighter-plane cockpit!
However, the principle of central steering is not at all new! Most of the very earliest steam- or i.c.- powered, road vehicles were centrally steered, many with a tiller rather than steering-wheel; but these were individual or made only in very small numbers.
Of the pioneers, perhaps the strangest was an early to mid-19C, steam-powered, three-wheeled bus designed by a man named Church, and apparently intended very optimistically for services between London and Birmingham but which proved pretty well hopeless even in test. Its accommodation style was based on the stage-coaches of the day with inside and roof seating; the machinery and its operator were in a large compartment to the rear; its single front wheel was steered from a seat in front of the salon. Its massively heavy construction complete with flamboyant ornamentation gave it an unfeasibly low power/weight ratio, and its plethora of auxiliary plant sapped considerable power from its not very efficient boiler and engine. It never went into service and all that remains of it are drawings and artwork including a contemporary publicity painting of it carrying a full complement of passengers through the countryside. A far cry from that converted Porsche 911!
WM BARR . =ABSOLUTE TRASH 