Eli5: Why is a cars drivers seat not positioned in the middle?
In: 50
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.
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