Though taken for granted today, the steering wheel was a transformative technology at the dawn of the age of the automobile.
As we enter the autonomous-vehicle age, some wonder whether the steering wheel might suffer the same fate as the tiller, which disappeared from cars after guiding the first horseless carriages.
Though the steering wheel’s origins are murky, race driver Alfred Vacheron signaled its ascent when he drove a Panhard automobile in the 1894 Paris-Rouen race. From that day forward, the days of the clumsy, nautical-derived tiller were numbered.
