Eli5: Why is a cars drivers seat not positioned in the middle?
In: 50
Because the driver regularly has to do things that require being close to the side. A drive-thru is probably the best example of this.
Multiple reasons.
Better visibility of oncoming traffic
Better passenger capacity
Allows placement of the transmission between footwells
Allows window access for the driver
Single-person racing cars like formula one and dragsters have the seat positioned in the middle. But for consumer cars it would entirely prevent having another passenger seat in front.
For real-world driving there’s also more benefit to being positioned closest to the middle of the road, not the middle of the lane because it gives you a better view of oncoming traffic. That’s why if you drive on the right side of the road, the driver’s seat is on the left and vice-versa.
The Fiat Multipla had three seats across the front so if they were so inclined they could have popped the driver in the middle!
Because driving on a public road is different than driving an obstacle course. The main benefit of sitting in the middle (in axis) is that both sides of the vehicle are equally far from you, and you see them equally well. Or, in the case that we just took a regular car and stucked the driver in the middle, equally badly.
Something like this would be beneficial if you wanted to perform acrobatic maneuvers or drive through hoops at high speed or something, because your brain wouldn’t have to compensate for you sitting to the side to evaluate the distances and angles. But you don’t need to do that, do you? What you do need, is to to see the road ahead of you well. That’s why drivers are seated towards the middle of the road (there’s no more road on the other side).
Also, if we put the driver in the middle, it would be harder to fit another seat there. Which isn’t a big deal for an F1 car, but it is a big deal for normal consumer cars.
Road legal compliance mostly.
The ultimate road car has the driver seat in the center tho
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLaren_F1
There are a bunch of reasons…
– It creates more blind spots for a driver, with the A-pillars (metal on either side of windshield) blocking more of their field of view at all times.
– Makes it harder to see over edge of fenders, makes it harder to gauge proximity to oncoming traffic
– Limits capacity inside, with no seat for passenger riding shotgun up front
– Harder to get in/out
– Makes it impossible to use drive-through at restaurants, bank ATM’s, toll booths, etc.
Early vehicles were modelled after carriages. Horse drawn carts and carriages are what settled the country where industrial automobile manufacturing first took off. And back in those days, you had a bench at the front of the cart that you sat on to navigate and direct the horses. You could sit anywhere on the bench you wanted because there was no mechanical interface forcing you into one spot. Consequently, people got used to having someone ride beside them on the bench while they directed the horses from a non-central position. Whether it was your spouse beside you and your kids in the middle (to keep them from bouncing out) or someone taking up a security role (aka “riding shotgun”), the driver on one side and a passenger on the other was already the standard. It just so happened that dividing the passenger compartment down the middle line simplifies positioning of the power train.
The average car today could not support a passenger beside the driver if the driver was seated in the middle. And we really need people to be driving around with passengers, not burning fuel commuting by themselves and then pretending to be aghast at climate change. More passengers, fewer drivers.
A lot of people are mentioning driving ergonomics but you also need to keep in mind:
Early cars didn’t have front transaxles like a lot of modern flat-bottomed sedans and minivans and such. They had an engine up front, usually a long inline 6 or 8 cylinder, then a trans extending through middle of the body underneath and a rear wheel drive axle.
For that arrangement, you have a transmission hump running down the middle of the body to make room for the transmission and driveshaft. That is in the way of an adult driver makes mounting and routing the controls more difficult. It’s just much easier to build, especially in a comfortable way, if you offset the driver to one side. Which side is influenced by all the factors others are mentioning.
Race cars with a middle seat even back in the day were generally rear-engine, which is why they didn’t have that problem, but they could afford a number of layout differences that didn’t make great sense for a commuter vehicle that needed to have multiple passengers and/or cargo.
Point is: It was mechanically difficult to build a center-driver commuter in the early days of cars when laws and conventions were being developed.
Why should it be. There is no benefit for having the seat in the middle. But a lot of reasons for having it to one side. You have better overview of the traffic, you can get in easier, you have place for a different seat at the front. So it’s not why is it not positioned in the middle but why should it be
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