BMW’s Head of Design Went to a Skid Pad to Defend the New Two-Spoke Steering Wheel

The wheel in question has two spokes — not three, not four — positioned at six and twelve o’clock. It’s the most talked-about interior detail on the new BMW iX3 and i3, and depending on who you ask, it’s either a bold stroke of design logic or the thing that keeps traditional BMW fans up at night. Van Hooydonk has heard both takes. He tested the wheel anyway.

First, the Obvious Question: Why?

“It’s the first time, as far as I know,” van Hooydonk confirmed when asked about the two-spoke layout at a closed design briefing ahead of the i3’s world premiere. And yes, he’s aware that’s a significant statement for a brand whose drivers have gripped a three-spoke wheel for decades.

The origin story, however, doesn’t start with the steering wheel at all. It starts with a display.

The Panoramic Vision Connection

The new i3 features BMW’s Panoramic Vision — a roughly 4-centimeter-wide strip of information projected along the base of the windscreen, spanning from the center console side across to the passenger. Think of it as a head-up display that’s been pulled down from the windshield and planted right in your natural sightline. The idea is that drivers can absorb relevant information — navigation, speed, range — without lifting their eyes from the road.

“We began to make the steering wheel smaller and flat on the top and on the bottom,” van Hooydonk explained. “In order to see that display, we needed to open up the sightline.” The logical consequence of eliminating horizontal spokes, it turns out, is a wheel with only vertical ones. Two spokes. Six o’clock and twelve o’clock. The thing you’ve been arguing about online is, in a very literal sense, a byproduct of where BMW put the screen.

But What About the Buttons?

This is where it gets genuinely clever. On a traditional steering wheel, thumb controls sit on horizontal spokes — convenient in theory, but requiring a slight bend of the thumb to reach them. BMW’s solution was to relocate the controls deeper into the wheel, positioned so the thumbs fall naturally without any awkward reach. “We move those switches in a position where you can operate it with your thumbs easily,” van Hooydonk said.

And here’s the detail most people have missed: there’s a physical gap where you’d expect the button cluster to connect to the center hub. “There is actually a hole through there,” van Hooydonk noted, “so there’s no connection to the center where the buttons are.” The controls sit on what BMW calls “satellites” — floating pods on the outer rim, architecturally separate from the spokes themselves. It looks unusual. It is unusual. But it’s also a considered ergonomic choice rather than a styling exercise.

They Tested It on a Skid Pad

Predictably, not everyone inside BMW was immediately convinced. When the design team proposed going to production with a two-spoke wheel, the test drivers had questions — and not just about city driving. “At some point somebody said, ‘yeah, it’s all good and well for steering in the city, but you can’t drift with it,’” van Hooydonk recalled with a hint of amusement.

His response? He went out and tested it himself.

“I actually went out and tried even that,” he said, “because you then have to turn it a bit more.” The wheel passed. Van Hooydonk’s skid pad session is probably not a scene BMW will put in the marketing materials, but it illustrates the point: this wasn’t signed off casually. The new steering wheel covered tens of thousands of kilometers with test drivers before it made it onto the production car.

“It was a big change,” van Hooydonk acknowledged, “but for a reason — because now the digital content does not get in the way of the driver.”

The Broader Logic

It’s worth stepping back and acknowledging what BMW is actually solving for here. The automotive industry has spent the better part of a decade either cramming screens onto dashboards or, in some cases, stripping out physical controls entirely in pursuit of minimalism. BMW is doing neither. The Panoramic Vision approach is a deliberate bet that the best place for relevant driving information is at the very bottom of your natural forward sightline — not on a central touchscreen you have to glance sideways at, and not high up on a heads-up display that sits in your peripheral field.

The two-spoke wheel, in that context, isn’t the controversial part. It’s the solution to the controversial part. And once you understand why the spokes had to move, the wheel starts to look less like a designer’s indulgence and more like an engineer’s answer to a real problem.

Whether you find it beautiful is, of course, another matter entirely. But BMW knew that going in. “You have to be very deliberate in the moves that you make,” van Hooydonk said — a line that, in retrospect, applies rather well to a steering wheel with a hole in it.