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.

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.”

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.

"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 distin