Opinion: There Needs To Be More Cars With A Central Driver Seat

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Anyone who has traveled abroad knows the feeling of immediate confusion that sets in from seeing people drive on the wrong side of the road. While the United States and most of the world drive on the right side of the road—with the driver positioned in the left-hand side of the car’s passenger compartment—citizens of nations including the United Kingdom, Japan, and Australia, among others, drive on the left side of the road, with the driver positioned on the right side of the car.

Making the switch while traveling and renting a car might seem easy, though in reality, it’s a pretty counterintuitive experience that typically leads to busted rearview mirrors—or worse. And just imagine how bad it gets when roads leaving RHD countries (sure, most of them are islands, but it does happen) have to mate with roads from LHD countries.

Why exactly some countries choose right-hand-drive and others choose left-hand-drive comes down to historical considerations like which side people carried their swords on—or which countries used to own other countries. But a question few people ask when thinking about RHD versus LHD is why everyone the world over doesn’t drive from the center of the car.

Well, there have been some rare sports cars that do feature center-mounted driver’s seats—the most famous of which is the McLaren F1 supercar that dominated the 1990s. And given the advantages, plus the pace of technology since then, there should definitely be more!

In the sports car world, the differences between RHD cars and LHD cars only get more excessive. After all, nobody in the United States wants to import a RHD to drive on the right side of the road unless it’s an extremely rare collectible, most of which are fun sports cars. The same applies for countries like the United Kingdom and Japan, where enthusiasts are forced to accept steering wheels on the strange side if they want to drive cars like the legendary Lancia Delta HF Integrale or early Porsche 911 examples.

Plus, owners of high-performance sports cars know the agonies of corner-balancing their vehicles by adjusting their coilovers, which needs to be performed relatively regularly, much like getting alignment specs dialed in, for the car to handle flawlessly at the edge of traction. Corner balancing adjusts the ride height of the car by nearly infinitesimal amounts to compensate mostly for the fact that the driver is typically seated on one side of the car or the other.

Again, the question of why vehicles intended for sporty driving haven’t always employed centrally located driver’s seats comes down to historical tendencies. For sports cars with the engine mounted under a front hood and power routing to the rear wheels, the engine and

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By: Torstein Salvesen
Title: Opinion: There Needs To Be More Cars With A Central Driver Seat
Sourced From: www.hotcars.com/opinion-needs-more-cars-central-driver-seat/
Published Date: Thu, 23 Jul 2020 15:45:36 GMT

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