The very earliest automobiles used tillers to control their steering, but by the turn of the century the nascent car industry settled on using a wheel to control the steering, perhaps taking inspiration from boats. With the driver's hands busy steering (and changing gears via a lever), pedals soon found favor as the optimum method of controlling the brakes and engines. Along the years, concept cars have appeared with alternative ideas, often involving aircraft-inspired joysticks. Nearly two decades of Gran Turismo and its ilk have trained gamers to control cars using d-pads, buttons, and triggers. Then there's the even more outlandish stuff like prone driving positions, a la Batman and his Tumbler Batmobile. Have we learned anything during the last hundred-plus years of driving that makes more sense than Edwardian-era human-vehicle interaction?

At first glance, the answer is no, not really. For the foreseeable future—at least with regard to non-autonomous vehicles—drivers are going to sit upright, up front, and they'll have a steering wheel and at least two pedals. But superficial similarities shouldn't suggest time has stood still in the car's cockpit. Decades of research has gone on that's shaped the way designers and engineers lay out our car interiors. And this work has focused largely on crash safety and spatial awareness, not to mention government regulations.

In favor of traditional controls

The first concept cars to do away with the steering wheel appeared in the 1950s. Detroit was infatuated by the aerospace industry at the time, adding fins and bubble canopies wherever possible. It makes sense that they'd try to stick in a pilot's joystick as well, and Ford's FX Atmos of 1954 was the most notable example. Still, the joystick, unlike those fins, never made the transition from the auto show to the street. Decades later, the concept reappeared. In 1996, Mercedes-Benz built a technology-laden research vehicle called The F200 Imagination.

Unlike much of the technology demo'd in this 1996 concept, the joystick controls never made it to the showroom.

The car was advanced for the time—the engine, brakes, and steering were all electronically controlled (rather than mechanically or with hydraulics). Drive-by-wire systems, where the throttle control is entirely electronic, are becoming increasingly common today. Any hybrid with regenerative braking will incorporate some form of brake-by-wire, though you're currently unlikely to cross paths with steer-by-wire beyond Infiniti's Q50 sedan. So The F200 Imagination, like those 50s concepts before it, saw a steering solution stay in the showroom. While the technology now might be ready for joysticks, it's unlikely to offer a compelling enough advantage to ditch our wheels.

Infiniti

Infiniti

The issue comes down to precision and feedback. For one, a wheel with several turns from lock to lock allows for much more accurate control than a stick with an inch or two of travel from side to side. For aircraft, that isn’t much of a problem, but aircraft don’t have to parallel park, squeeze through busy city streets, or cruise along in the middle lane of a motorway with traffic on either side. Given the need for precision, the value of feedback as part of a pleasant driving experience can’t be overstated. It's much easier to channel feedback from the front tires to a steering wheel for the same reasons the wheel is more precise than a joystick. So even if we didn’t have to account for an entire installed user base that's used to a steering wheel and pedals, the chances of seeing a different solution on our roads seems extremely remote due to the current setup's accuracy advantages. (Like the wheel, pedals are in no danger of disappearing any time soon even if the cars modified for paraplegic drivers have shown it’s quite possible to drive without using one’s feet.)

So car designers, rather than ditching the wheel, have actually been heading in the other direction. They're increasingly pulling controls off the dashboard and putting them right at our fingertips. Infotainment and cruise controls showed up first, Pontiac in particular blazing a trail in the 1980s. Today some companies are going much further. Ferrari, inspired by the complex multifunction wheels used in its Formula 1 cars, has been migrating almost all driver controls to the steering wheel, including things like windscreen wipers and headlights. So-called 'flappy paddles' for changing gear have also crossed over from the race track to the showroom, and these are now getting quite common in cars with either automatic or dual-clutch gearboxes.