Volvo Patent Shows Steering That Can Switch Places, but There’s a Big Catch

Ever wanted to just slide the steering wheel over to your front seat passenger and let them drive after a little too much verbal input from that passenger about your driving? Volvo has filed a patent a system that will do just that, placing the steering wheel on a rail that will permit it to slide over from the left seat to the right seat, or even to the center, if you want to pretend you’re in a McLaren F1.

Will driving from the center position become a hipster trend in the future? Or will driving from the right side of the car become a mark of taste and sophistication?

As you’ve no doubt guessed by now, the utility of this system rests not in using your car to deliver mail (though this gig economy future is surely about to arrive), but in how our cars’ interiors will change when fully autonomous vehicles get here. Of course, there’s that little issue of Level 4 or Level 5 autonomy actually materializing.

What’s a little surprising about Volvo’s setup is that it took this long for a patent to be filed for such a system. Because we’re sure we’ve seen this before in several concept cars.

Such a system was present in the Rinspeed XchangE concept from 2014, which was a Tesla Model S with a very reconfigurable interior. The Lagonda Vision Concept from 2018 also featured a steering wheel that could slide from one side of the car to the other. The Mini Next 100 concept of 2016 also featured such a steering setup. And that’s just from the past few years.

We can go back even further to 2004 when the Toyota Alessandro Volta Concept featured such a system, with the steering and pedals having the ability to slide along rails from the left side of the car to the right, and even to the center. If we spent a few more minutes looking for such concepts, we have a feeling we’d find a few more.

Of course, not all of these systems were configured exactly the same, there’s still the issue of pedals. Some concepts had positioned them on a sliding rail, which tends to require the absence of a transmission tunnel. Others simply featured two sets of pedals, which seems to be a simpler and cheaper way to go.

However, the single biggest limiting factor of such a system is perhaps not the most obvious one.

Volvo cars now feature a large, vertically oriented infotainment touchscreeen. If the steering wheel were to move along a rail, that rail would pretty much have to go through the screen. One way around this issue is to position the sliding wheel on a very long hinge that would go under the screen or over it. Volvo’s patent solves this issue by simply not having a vertical touchscreen.

So it seems you can either have a sliding steering wheel on a rail or you can have a large vertical infotainment screen, but you probably can’t have both.

Not to worry: By the time Level 4 or Leve 5 automation makes its way into production cars, screens will have been replaced by some sort of semi-transparent hologram.

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