We get told some right old cobblers in this business, by companies who would like us to believe, care, or, more likely, just idly repeat some of the nonsense they feed us.
Bad enough are non-news press releases (care, for example, that Spandau Ballet have chosen the Ford S-Max as their tour support wagon? No, I thought not).
But it’s the technical stuff we’re sometimes expected to swallow that is harder still to bear.
Videos, hi-res pics and first drive review of of the Lexus LFA
Take the Lexus LFA supercar, for example. Lovely car, by all accounts.
But it has, you’ll not be surprised to hear, a flat-bottomed steering wheel.
These things – these hateful things – seem now to be de rigueur on cars with the vaguest sporting bent, despite the fact that steering wheels have been round, for well over a century, for perfectly good reasons.
Take away their roundness and, as Austin discovered, you take away their usability.
Manufacturers continue to fit them, though, because they think they look cool.
Except Lexus. No, Lexus says it’s using one on the LFA because it offers a genuine improvement in driver involvement.
This is a fib.
“With 28mm cut away from its lower half, the flat-bottomed design creates a higher rotational centre closer to the steering wheel’s centre of gravity, making it less affected by centrifugal force,” reads Lexus’s extensive cobblers.
Notwithstanding the fact that if Lexus wanted to keep weight off the wheel, it wouldn’t have put a start button and stereo controls on it, I have worked out roughly how much weight flattening the rim shaves.
It’s not a lot.
Squaring off 65 degrees from the circle saves, in the carbon fibre rim itself, about two grams.
(A one penny piece weighs three and a half grams, by the way.)
There is also, true, some weight saved in the spoke. By reducing the bottom spoke’s length by 28mm, I reckon Lexus has genuinely saved about 30g.
However, Lexus proudly also says it has – to that very spoke – added “a weighted lower end [to] mitigate the moment of inertia that occurs when winding off lock and returning the wheel to the centre, providing the driver with a more natural self-centring steering feel.”
In other words, Lexus removed some weight from the bottom of the steering wheel. Before adding some weight to the bottom of the steering wheel.
Frankly, this sort of bloody nonsense has to stop.
The next car that arrives sporting one of these infernal flattened wheels loses half a star from its rating.
Technorati Tags: Lexus LFA, steering wheel, flat-bottom
