My daughter started driving last year and they taught them to feed the wheel around as they turn, rather than the hand-over-hand method that I learned. Regardless of your preferred method, the whole issue would go away if the wheel were geared so that you only had to turn it a half turn in either direction. With the advent of power steering, why haven’t steering wheels be regeared to allow both hands to firmly grip the wheel at all times?
If half of a turn made the wheels go all the way to the side how would you make fine adjustments to stay in your lane?
The obvious answer is that the current method gives you a lot of control to handle slight turns more easily–like the kind you need to smoothly change lanes at highway speeds.
Because half a turn would make fine controls a lot harder. Tractors (as in farm equipment) turn something like 6 full circles in each direction (or maybe its 3 in each) to give them very fine control.
I would guess that you could very quickly adapt to a much shorter swing on the wheel but it would certainly make over corrections easier.
The action is actually variable, with the steering wheel being more sensitive at the straight ahead position, and progressively coarser as the wheels turn. In my car the power assist is greater at the extremes than at the centre too.
Like so many things the total number of turns is a compromise between ease of use and keeping control.
My little Mazda Protege doesn’t have much gearing on the steering wheel. A friend of mine has basically the same car, and he calls it “go-cart steering” because that’s what it feels like. You don’t have as much fine control and it’s not very comfortable to drive. It works ok on small cheap cars, but that tight steering also contributes significantly to the small and cheap feel of the drive.
In the good old days, there were a lot more cars that didn’t have power steering. The hand-over-hand method gave you more torque and allowed you to more easily turn the wheel. These days, cars almost always have power steering, and they also have airbags. If you get into an accident and you are using the hand-over-hand method at the time, there’s a good chance that the airbag will break your arm. You also could end up with some pretty nasty burns on your arms.
That’s why they changed it. The change in methods has a lot more to do with the changes in technology than a personal preference thing.
Wow, am I missing something? I have a 2001 Protege and I love the way it handles, but I’ve only compared it to other boring passenger sedans and (ugh) Priuses. If the Protege is a “small and cheap” feel, what other car in its price category is better?
If power steering ratios are too extreme it is impossible to drive the car if the PS fails or the engine stalls. The engine can die while in motion from just running out of gas, to electrical or mechanical failure. Bad enough having the engine die in traffic, much worse if you also can’t steer.
Growing up, my parents had a continental town car that would occasionally die in the middle of a left hand turn. Real exciting centering the wheel without PS to avoid hitting cars stopped on cross street.
They were teaching the feed-the-wheel technique in the AA driving manual forty years ago, when power steering was uncommon in the UK.
(Lightning prevented edit within window) - that was the Ministry of Transport manual, not the Automobile Association.
I remember reading where the police driving school got around to asking a top rally driver (maybe Colin McRae) to give them some help to make the cops drive better at high speed. He was astonished to see them ‘feeding’ the wheel and easily demonstrated how much better it is to cross the hands when driving a performance car fast.
For the rest of us, ‘feeding’ the wheel is still required when taking a driving test.
Oh the Brits and their “Push Pull” steering. The most awkward method of driving a car that actually involves hands imaginable.
It may be a throwback to manual stearing where that amount of mechanical advantage was needed. But it also goes back to the old racing saying 1/8 of a turn (of the wheel) and you are thru the corner, a 1/4 of a turn and you are thru for the season, which goes to demonstrate that reducing this too much makes driving a lot less forgiving.
Exactly, one sneeze would put yon into oncoming traffic with a really quick steering ratio.
When I was a boy, my Scout troop took a trip to … somewhere … and the place had a go-kart track. The track was laid out with big, sweeping curves. We were all too young to have any actual automobile-driving experience, but we all quickly figured out how to steer the go-karts (like a bicycle - slight adjustments). Except for one kid. He just could not grasp it at all, and as he approached every single curve, he’d crank the wheel hard in one direction or the other and immediately make a 90° turn straight into the hay bales lining the track. He eventually had to be removed from the course, because every time he crashed they had to stop everything while the attendant ran out, pulled the go-kart backward, and got him straightened out.
Looking back, it’s clear that his brain was seeing the go-kart as simply a tiny car, and he was trying to steer it the way he’d seen his parents, or drivers on TV steering real cars.
My Mazda Miata has very tight steering, small moves make big changes. I like it but you do have to be careful and it took some getting used to. I am sure that this was intentional as it is a “sports car”(I use the term loosely) , it also lets you feel the road as in every bump.
Just a different setup.
Capt
I have to agree with you. When I was just a tot I bought a TR-3 and tried to learn that crossed hands method and couldn’t do it.
Not any more.
http://www.laticsdrivertraining.com/blog/2009/09/21/dsa-sees-sense-on-steering-but-have-instructors/
Your post reminded me of the one single moment when I truly thought I was going to die.
I was teaching my daughter how to drive and we were going onto the freeway for her first time. I told her to floor it, explaining that this was no time for timidity and that we needed to merge at speed.
She didn’t realize that tiny movements of the steering wheel have a greater effect at high speed. We started swinging wildly back and forth, me imagining us rolling and bursting into flames in a second or two, when she finally found the groove and brought the car under control.
The point being, what seems like a huge waste in wheel turning provides the fine control at highway speeds—we only really need about 45 degrees of play on either side of center for most highway maneuvers. Imagine how tiny that sweet spot would be if the wheel only made one revolution from stop to stop.
More like the handle bars on a motorcycle. One short movement is all it takes. My kids learned motorcycles before cars and they all three asked me the same question the OP is asking.