Buttons and Controls On The Steering Wheel
The first button added to the steering wheel was a switch to activate the car's electric horn. Traditionally located on the steering wheel hub or center pad, the horn switch was sometimes placed on the spokes or activated via a decorative horn ring which obviated the necessity to move a hand away from the rim. A further development, the Rim Blow steering wheel, integrated the horn switch into the steering wheel rim itself.
When speed control systems were introduced in the 1960s, some automakers located the operating switches for this feature on the steering wheel. In the 1990s, a proliferation of new buttons began to appear on automobile steering wheels. Remote or alternate adjustments for the audio system, the telephone and voice control, acoustic repetition of the last navigation instruction, stereo system, and on board computer functions can be operated comfortably and safely using buttons on the steering wheel. This ensures a high standard of additional safety since the driver is able in this way to control and operate many systems without even taking hands off the wheel or eyes off the road.
The scroll buttons can be used to set volume levels or page through menus.
Steering wheel audio control can use universal interfaces, wired or wirelessly.
The buttons can be adjusted manually for reach and height.
Read more about this topic: Steering Wheel
Famous quotes containing the words steering wheel, buttons and, buttons, controls, steering and/or wheel:
“Behind the steering wheel
The boy took out his own forehead.
His girlfriend’s head was a green bag
Of narcissus stems. “OK you win
But meet me anyway at Cohen’s Drug Store
In 22 minutes.””
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Now your beer belly hangs outlike Fatso.
You are popping your buttons and expelling gas.
How can I lie down with you, my comical beau
when you are so middle-aged and lower-class.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears”
—Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“The boat is made of dry reeds, and a monkey is steering it.”
—Punjabi proverb, trans. by Gurinder Singh Mann.
“Of the wheel as it rolls unrelentingly over
A cow plodding through car-traffic on a street in Iasi,
And over the haunts of Robert Pinsky’s mother and father
And wife and children and his sweet self”
—Robert Pinsky (b. 1940)