Re: European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls

Not a crash victim, by the looks of it. It's more like an elaborate ceremonial burial.

Jeroen Belleman

No problem. Use Chrome to read it, and Google will translate it well enough.

Joe Gwinn

Though they seem to be talking about driving controls, rather than controls that a driver might be expected to use while driving, such as the air-conditioning and radio volume controls.

I'm not aware of a vehicle that has moved any of the driving controls to a touch screen, so perhaps they're just hoping to preempt that.

Sylvia.

In the US at least, there is a legal definition of an automobile in each state, and these definitions typically require various things to be physically present. Nobody has tried or talked of eliminating the steering wheel, except in truly autonomous vehicles.

There was a funny case from the 1970s, where some California hippies in a VW Bus without a motor or licence plates were traveling on the highway by getting out and pushing the bus to the top of the next hill, getting in and coasting down and then up till it stopped. Rinse and repeat.

The police tried to stop this, but were foiled because the legal definition required that it have a motor, which it didn't. So it didn't need to be licensed, etc. California changed the law to stop the fun.

But cars that don't have a steering wheel, instead having a side-stick (like a fighter aircraft) are legal.

Joe Gwinn