Talk:Car controls

Scope of this article
I'm surprised that this article didn't already exist. Should also link to List of auto parts as an outline. The title may need tweaking, (e.g. headlamps and signals do not control the car), to clarify the scope of the article. --Animalparty-- (talk) 21:56, 29 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Hi Animalparty. I've been wanting to create this for quite a while! I've always been curious about at what point it was decided that a car would be steered with a wheel and its speed controlled by pedals and levers. Nowadays anyone can jump in a rental car and drive off, the controls are so standardised. But until recently there was a lot more variety, e.g. the high beam switch on American cars was on the floor. Citroens and Renaults had a manual shift knob coming out of the dashboard. Saabs had the ignition key by the hand brake etc. I'd like to track down old car user manuals and document early control systems. Good point about the headlamps and signals. I wondered whether the article should be titled "Automobile user interfaces". I'm thinking leave headlamps and signals in because it's just easier to be inclusive than exclusive. E.g. I think it would be very difficult to define what does control the car. There are grey areas. E.g. you can't drive a car in the rain without wipers. What about the key? Yes it's used for security but it's also used to start the engine. I look foward to seeing some research done and added to this article! --Cornellier (talk) 22:06, 29 March 2014 (UTC)


 * "Nowadays anyone can jump in a rental car and drive off". I know I'm not the only person to have spent fifteen minutes looking for the headlight switch in an unfamiliar hire car, and the sooner car hire companies are forced, at gunpoint if need be, to leave the manual in the vehicle the better. Joking aside, there was a Top Gear piece a while back which attempted to determine the first car with major controls as we know them today; IIRC it concluded that it was a WW1-era Cadillac.  Also the cruise control switches on my car are on the indicator stalk :-) Mr Larrington (talk) 12:03, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

Proposed merge with Automobile pedal
They are just what they are, "car controls". &#60;&#60;&#60; SOME GADGET GEEK &#62;&#62;&#62; (talk) 16:00, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Do it. --Cornellier (talk) 04:25, 10 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Support - Car controls would benefit from having the contents from Automobile pedal merged. I'm actually surprised gas pedal has its own page and that its not already included in car control. Meatsgains (talk) 16:44, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Apropos pedals, someone with more time on their hands might care to research which vehicles had central accelerator pedals. The practice has died out, but from memory W.O-era Bentleys and the Maserati 250F Formula 1 car had them. Mr Larrington (talk) 10:47, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Copy editing reviews: 4/7/17 UTC
Hi, and ! Thank you for your edits to this page! Reidgreg pointed out that I could review them (here, but I'm not exactly sure how to do that. Nonetheless, I think that they are great! The only thing that I would change is a matter of preference (since the invention of cars -> since cars were invented), but the phrase is fine as is. At any rate, as I said, everything seems great! If someone can help me formally review them, that would be nice. Thanks! Noah Kastin (talk) 00:39, 7 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Sorry, poor choice of words ("review" is used in a lot of contexts on the Wiki, and can be ambiguous). I meant for your own interest, not in a formal sense.  If you go to the article and follow the link at the top to "View history" it will list the recent revisions to the page.  You can look through these one-by-one, or you can use the radio buttons to select a range and then click on "Compare selected revisions" to view all the changes over those edits.  This way you can look at all of the additional edits that we made (Jonesey95 is also in there!).  You can also look at any version of the page from the history.  So you can look through a version of the page pre-copyedit, think about what changes you might have made, and then see what we changed and whether you might have missed anything. – Reidgreg (talk) 09:14, 7 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Nothing much to add except to say: Have fun! Don't obsess over your edits. Nobody is right 100% of the time. Twofingered Typist (talk) 12:20, 7 April 2017 (UTC)