Member-only story
Why do some cars have the indicator stalk on the opposite side of the steering wheel?
In your opinion, which is the ‘opposite side’? For me, and most of the Australian population, that would be the left-hand side.
If like me you have lived in Australia your whole life and are familiar with mainly domestic or Japanese manufactured cars like Holden, Toyota, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Subaru or Nissan you may not realise that some European cars sold in Australia have an indicator stalk where the windscreen wiper stalk belongs (on the left).
I recently drove my partner’s Volkswagen Golf, a make and model manufactured and assembled in Germany, a left-hand drive (LHD) market, and consequently has an indicator stalk on the left side of the steering column. At almost every intersection I would activate the windscreen wipers instead of the indicator prompting a small fright and great embarrassment.
I pondered why Volkswagen would put the indicator stalk on the wrong side of the steering wheel. After some research, it seems Japan and Australia, are part of a minority of countries that have left-hand traffic (driving on the left-hand side of the road) with the rest of the world adopting right-hand traffic.
When it comes to which side of the car the steering wheel is on, the general rule is that the driver will be positioned so that they sit closest to the road’s centre line (“Right- and left-hand traffic”, 2016). In Germany, a country of right-hand traffic, the driver will control the car from the left-hand side and be known as a left-hand drive.
Discussion regarding the control and instrument designs suggest the most ergonomic placement of the indicator stalk is closest to the driver’s door so as to allow the driver to indicate with one hand while the other is free to operate the gear shifter. So, it could be said that a European car in the Australian is less ergonomic than the domestic options.
Speaking in basic terms there are three distinct processes to car production; design, manufacture and assembly (Toyota Motors, 2016). Since the majority of the world is a left-hand drive market and four of the five top auto-producing countries are left-hand drive markets (“2015 Statistics | OICA”, 2015) the entire manufacturing process typically favours LHD vehicles…
