Peugeot’s New Polygon Concept Car Has a Rectangular Steering Wheel

The trend, for several years now, has been for automakers bent on looking different to reinvent that most basic of car features, the steering wheel, with ever more odd and unnecessary shapes. Enter Peugeot, which recently unveiled its rectangular “Hypersquare” steering wheel in a new concept that the brand says is “reinventing the wheel.”

The Polygon Concept’s steering wheel is more of a rectangle, with rounded-off edges and holes, to improve grip. Overall, the Polygon Concept is said to preview Peugeot’s design philosophy for its next generation of cars, and, specifically, the 208. Future production cars from the marque likely won’t have the Hypersquare steering thing, nor the gullwing doors on the Polygon Concept, but may look quite a bit like the flashy, LED-encrusted car Peugeot debuted in Paris.

Gone, too, are dashboard displays, and, in fact, any sort of screen at all up front. Instead, there is a sort of heads-up display on steroids.

“No more dashboard displays—all information reflects onto the windscreen via a Micro-LED panel located behind Hypersquare,” Peugeot said in a statement. “This innovation offers a uniquely immersive experience for the driver, with an exceptional display size: 24 cm wide by 74 cm high—that’s the equivalent to a 31’’ screen.”

In racing contexts, like in Formula 1, a yoke empowers the driver to control the car within the limits of a tiny cockpit in which space and weight are at a premium, and in an application where it’s simply unsafe if the driver’s hands separate from the yoke or wheel. In the context of an urban car, where time, space, performance, and weight are less vital, something other than a steering wheel begins to feel more like a stunt.

Still, the Hypersquare is a steer-by-wire setup, meaning that there is no mechanical connection between the steering and the car’s wheels, and turning the Hypersquare produces variable responses at different speeds. While parallel parking, for example, a small turn of the Hypersquare would produce a bigger turn of the wheels, while on the highway, less so, giving more control to the driver. Steer-by-wire is a feature in the Tesla Cybertruck, among other cars, and is likely to be in many a future car; virtually all that’s left after that in terms of steering wheel innovation is to remove it entirely.

Click here for more photos of the Peugeot Polygon Concept.

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