Just ask anyone who has never driven a car: What is the shape of a car steering wheel? There is only one answer you can get: round. However, if the editor asks you another question, it will be difficult for you to answer: Why is the steering wheel round?
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You might say: Because it is round, it is round.
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Therefore, many questions that seem to be easy to answer are actually not as simple as we think.
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To talk about why the steering wheel is round, we have to start with the history of cars. Before the advent of automobiles, people's main form of transportation was horse-drawn carriages. Then when engines appeared, people got rid of the horses and only used the part at the back to pull people. So that's what happened.
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This is the first car in the history of automobiles - Mercedes-Benz One. Its steering wheel is a swinging rod. In fact, it should be called a direction rod.
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Shortly after the birth of the automobile, in order to improve the safety and handling performance of the vehicle, people placed the engine in front of the vehicle, and the center of gravity of the vehicle moved forward. The short directional bar made the steering operation extremely difficult.
As a result, smart humans got inspiration from marine rudders, made the parts that control the direction of the car circular, and introduced a reduction gear structure into the directional joystick to simplify the steering operation of the car through torque amplification.
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Although the history of automobiles is very short, humans have thousands of years of sailing history, and ship technology is still available, so rudders were borrowed from automobiles, and the round steering wheels are still in use today.
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However, even round steering wheels can be divided into many types. The more familiar ones are four-spoke steering wheels, three-spoke steering wheels, and the very rare two-spoke steering wheels.
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In addition, did you know that there is also a single-width steering wheel? For example, the single-spoke steering wheel of the 1974 Citroën DS model is a very representative alternative steering wheel.
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In addition, Sweden's Saab once developed a steering wheel that uses an aircraft steering column. This design is also strange enough, but fortunately it is only a design on a concept car.
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Do you think other than that the steering wheels are all round? Not really!
The most typical example, on an F1 racing car, the steering wheel looks like this~~~
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Because the cockpit space of an F1 racing car is very compact, the driver has very little room to maneuver. The steering wheel is designed to be very small, and the steering range is not as long as that of ordinary family cars. Various control switches and gears are integrated on the steering wheel. bit button.
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In traditional family cars, the design of round steering wheels has gradually been broken. The original round steering wheels began to become oval-shaped and became smaller and smaller, and then turned into the very common D-shaped steering wheel. This design It can provide more space for the driver's legs and the design is more user-friendly.
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