- Hyundai has patent a new design of steering wheel with provision for rim-mounted shift lights.
- The simplified design features a cutout in the top that can accommodate a display and finishing panel.
- Cars without the shift lights would also get the same wheel minus the clever tech.
Having shift lights built into the rim of a steering wheel helps racecar drivers perfectly time their ratio swaps when every lost tenth from clipping the limiter can mean the difference between glory or going home empty-handed. That’s hardly a concern when you’re dropping your kids off at school or navigating the McDonalds’s Drive-Thru, but those same shift lights add some real motorsport pizazz to any interior, which is why Hyundai has filed a patent to bring the same tech to its road car lineup.
Wheel-mounted shift lights are nothing new, of course. They’ve been available for years on Ferrari’s supercars, and you can also buy them from BMW’s M Performance catalog. But they’re not cheap options and not simply because they’re often matched with carbon fiber coverings.
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Their different design requires a different manufacturing process that prevents them becoming standard fare on mainstream performance cars. But Hyundai thinks it can solve that problem with a new modular wheel design that will cut production costs.
Hyundai’s simple, but clever idea is to make all versions of a steering wheel with a groove on the upper part of the rim that can accommodate an LED display. Base wheels wouldn’t have the display, merely a cover, but the automaker would be able to cheaply and simply add the display to performance variants when needed.
Pumping out thousands of the same wheel would make even the trick go-faster versions far cheaper to build than the equivalent BMW M Performance wheel. And hopefully they’d be cheaper to buy. BMW’s rim costs over $1,500, but maybe Hyundai could bring the price down significantly.
Hyundai’s N Performance parts catalog would seem like the most obvious home for the new wheel tech, but the patent drawings show a Genesis wheel and we know the upscale Korean brand is pushing into the performance space with its new Magma models, starting with the GV60. What would you pay for a shift-light wheel on a Hyundai N car?
H/T to Carbuzz