What Happened to Steering Feel?

I happened to come across this article today, and thought I'd see what y'alls thoughts are.  I regularly drive cars that run the gamut from 1960's manual steering to 90's cars with conventional hydraulically-assisted power steering to modern with electric steering, and there's definitely something about the modern electric steering that leaves somewhat of a disconnected feeling in the driver.  I love how my Mazda3 handles, but in terms of communicating to the driver, my '64 Corvair or '67 Volvo beat it handily.   Is this something that's been done intentionally, or do people just not care so car companies don't worry about it?

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/01/new-cars-have-lost-their-steering-feel-heres-why-that-matters/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Car companies don't care as so few enthusiasts are left to buy new cars. Electric steering is often terrible for feed back, but needed for active lane assist, self driving, etc.

That's why I have mine set to sport or track mode in the mustang. Anything else is a overboosted mush.

The actual "Feel" that we car enthusiast revered, was not something that the other 99% of the driving audience assigned any value to.  

The other thing to consider is that steering feel is a bit of a hairshirt in that it comes with steering effort that most people do not want.

As a result, the car companies are free to set their own standard of what "Feel" is of benefit to their customers. Leading the charge was what would be of most benefit to the car companies. To their credit, some car companies do an admirable job of engineering a steering feedback feel that is quite plesant ie the FRS.

The point about the EPAS motor being sort of an immovable object in the steering column, resisting feedback from the tires from reaching the driver, is interesting. That's something I hadn't considered before.

I wonder how different companies handle that. Apparently some implementations (RX-8, FRS/BRZ) are better than others.

On the other hand, having driven a few front end setups that tramlined badly, having a steering system that only goes where you command it to go sounds like it would be kind of nice sometimes.

Got a rental Ranger a while back, before COVID I think.  Driving it felt like I was encased in a wool box.

The most interesting part of the article, to me, was about the Ford engineer who talked about chassis and steering being two things he really sweated.  Even non-enthusiasts would get out of a car, like the Focus mentioned, and comment on how nice it was to drive. 

Some in the company would say, "Richard why are you doing that? Spending all the money on chassis and steering? Customers never ask about things like that." But they were wrong. People got into a Focus and said, "I really like driving it." You'd ask why and they'd say, "I don't know; I just do." Understanding why they like it is our job. I tracked customer satisfaction against attributes like steering, brakes, spaciousness, and so on. To people's amazement, I was able to prove that steering was the most strongly correlated, because bad steering is tiring.

[..]

That's what I learned about vehicle dynamics and linear responses: it's tiring if it's bad but rewarding if it's good.

Everyone appreciates good steering feel, the same way folks prefer good visibility (and in that case, we've substituted it for cameras and video screens). 

I still remember the rental Corolla I had a couple years ago.  The steering felt like one of the old stand up Pole Position arcades. 

To my knowledge, there are no mass-market new vehicles nowadays that don't have power steering, and I would suspect 100% of cars are electric in that regard, and at least 1/2 of all 1/2 ton or smaller trucks.  We're pretty much as the point now where everyone forgets what it was like to drive cars with real feel, other than folks who own and drive older cars like us. 

In reply to volvoclearinghouse :

My wife's 2017 S60 has pretty decent steering feel for being electric, plus you can dial in at least 3 discernable levels of steering assist.  On the middle setting it's reasonably feely, and on the firm setting it's actually quite good.

Unfortunately, it's not as good on my 2019.  Too boosty, even at what may or may not be the firmest setting (the fact that I can't tell which setting is which says a lot).   Volvo went backwards in this regard.  The car that was designed in about 2012 was better.

I agree with the core approach of Richard Parry-Jones mentioned there.  

That said, I think as far as ARS articles go, this is fairly disappointing.  Its very broad-brush painting of the reasons behind  a decrease in steering feel.

volvoclearinghouse said:

To my knowledge, there are no mass-market new vehicles nowadays that don't have power steering, and I would suspect 100% of cars are electric in that regard, and at least 1/2 of all 1/2 ton or smaller trucks.  We're pretty much as the point now where everyone forgets what it was like to drive cars with real feel, other than folks who own and drive older cars like us. 

What does an ND Miata feel like?  IIRC My S2000 steering feel was fine even though it is electric assist.  How is the RX8?

Ars is not at their best in the automotive world, but don't you dare tell Gitlin that. He'll cut you.

 The revised ND rack is pretty good - and it notably has the assist motor on the rack and not the shaft for that reason. Interestingly, not a single journalist has noticed the change from EPAS to hydraulic steering on our ND V8.

But I think the biggest mistake made here and elsewhere is that weight is not the same as feel. You can have good steering feel with light effort, and you can have a heavy rack that doesn't really talk to you. But most enthusiasts consider them one and the same. EPAS makes it easy to dial the amount of assist up and down so you don't have to work hard.

BTW, I have an ND rack on my workbench with a plan on how to modify the amount of steering assist, so people can have that heavier effort if they want it :)

I'm probably going to be the odd one out here but I don't really give a E36 M3 about 'steering feel'. My last car had 3 settings, comfort, normal and sport.  I kept it on comfort all the time. Steering effort means nothing to me as far as feel. It's more to do with the connection that the steering input has, and the feedback you get from the chassis

I guess I was typing while Keith was posting.

I drove a friend's 2019 Corolla recently. The steering felt like it was connected through a marshmallow. I commented that it was a perfect car for someone that hates driving. 
The irony is that if I had to daily it, and never got to drive anything else, I would hate driving too. 

That's typical Corolla. They're awful cars

Keith Tanner said:

Ars is not at their best in the automotive world, but don't you dare tell Gitlin that. He'll cut you.

I like a lot of their automotive content.  Its presented from a non-expert standpoint and is pretty solid for most.  This is a highly technical issue and I think it requires expertise to have an intelligent discussion about.

Something fun to do is to take a GM with rack mounted EPAS, start the engine, raise the front wheels, and try to move the steering side to side by moving the tire.

You can't.  The EPAS actively fights you.  This translates to zero steering feel.

IMO steering feel started to die when tire aspect ratios went lower than 70.  Low profile tires have a shorter, wider contact patch, which is more prone to wander, so to keep the driver from having to constantly mind the steering the geometry is designed to put the stability in the suspension instead of the tires.  This kills feel.  It also makes the steering heavier, so power assist is needed, in a self feeding cycle.

Keith Tanner said:

But I think the biggest mistake made here and elsewhere is that weight is not the same as feel. 

Exactly!  The only valuable feedback I get from a steering wheel is the light feeling when I turn in too much and the front tires are about to give up.  Is there any other feedback that's useful?

I think there's some relationship to feedback and heavy steering, though.  It can be tricky to feel already-light steering go lighter.  So on 1980s arcade-style power steering, it's almost impossible to notice the light steering get lighter.  And on a depowered NA Miata rack, I find the heavy-to-light transmission to be impossible to miss, whereas it's a lot easier to miss on a powered rack.  I find that while the manual rack has a lighter feel than the depowered rack, the feedback is probably just as good if not better.

For packaging reasons, I ended up dramatically slowing down the steering ratio on my formula Vee, which just has a stock Beetle steering box and now has a stock Beetle steering ratio.  It originally had significantly quicker steering.  The slower steering with the lighter effort ended up making me more precise. Even though that heavy-to-light transition is a little more subtle, I have more room to find the right steering input.  Of course, trying to save a spin is a lot harder now...

Then there's the Focus RS which adjusts steering "feel" based on driving mode.  In sport/track modes it's heavier, but I don't feel like the feedback is particularly good or different either way.

All of my sports cars had been manual steering before I bought my Solstice coupe and BMW Z4M coupe. The Solstice overlapped with my long time 88 Fiero ownership and when I drive the Solstice for awhile, I felt that the steering was pretty decent. Then I'd get into the Fiero and it was like a breath of fresh air, the steering was so much better. Same for the BMW, which has a specially built hydraulic rack in place of the electric units used in the non-M cars.  Good, but not as good as the manual.

The kicker in all this is the big fat tires fitted to modern cars. You can get away with manual steering on something that has moderate tire sizes like a Miata (a guy I know depowered his Miata rack so he would have feel for solo competition - not sure how he did that but our resident expert can comment) . When you run 245x45-18 or so, I doubt that you'd be able to do that.

I published a guide on depowering Miata racks back in 2002 :) It's not all that difficult, but running autox with a depowered rack would give you a workout. I suspect that you'd be working so hard that you'd lose the ability to do fine corrections, like Berck's Formula Vee experience.

My E39 M5 has a "sport" button that changes the level of steering assist. That car isn't a poster child for ideal steering due to the steering box dictaged by packaging constraints though, so I'm not sure it's a good example. The Tesla has a steering assist setting but it doesn't get the sort of use that demands much. It's got better feel than the 1966 Cadillac, so maybe they're not all worse than they used to be :)

My original 1990 Miata has the most beautiful steering feel of any car I think I've ever driven. And I don't know why that car stands out even amongst other 1990 Miatas. Something with the alignment, I'm guessing. Someday I'm going to dissect it and find out why.

ProDarwin said:

Keith Tanner said:

Ars is not at their best in the automotive world, but don't you dare tell Gitlin that. He'll cut you.

I like a lot of their automotive content.  Its presented from a non-expert standpoint and is pretty solid for most.  This is a highly technical issue and I think it requires expertise to have an intelligent discussion about.

It's all relative. They're great at space stuff :) Their automotive is okay in that it's generally not sensationalist and is pretty solid like you say, but they run out of depth on technical issues sooner in that field than in other areas they cover.

I don't think the EPAS motor itself is to blame, it's not at all an immovable object, it's an electric motor geared to the column through two spur gears, and the column can absolutely move the motor.

The biggest difference between your typical EPAS system and hydraulic power steering is that it acts on the steering column rather than the rack. Both systems have a flexible element in the column that commands the power steering based on the torque being put through the column - an electronic load cell vs. a hydraulic quill valve. If anything is killing steering feel it's the general quest to decrease NVH. The average driver puts a minor to negative value on steering feel, plus it threatens to work the PS system harder and make the ETC system's work more difficult, so manufacturers are definitely looking to eliminate it on anything that's not a sports car.

My Toyobaru's steering feel is pretty good, very similar to a stock NA/NB Miata, and I'm told there's a lot more to be had through harder steering rack bushings.

Like with most things active and electronic, there's a learning curve to figuring out how to actually use and tune it well. The first e-throttles had some issues, it's taken until really pretty recently for manufacturers to figure out how to tune electronic dampers well, it's the same with power steering. One thing that's not really accurate in the article, I don't know exact numbers but at this point a sizeable portion, if not the majority, of EPS systems are rack assist, not column assist. It is true that most of the early systems were column assist, and it's also true that the closer the assist motor is to the steering wheel, the more feedback gets filtered out. Which is part of the reason the early systems were so bad.

I've definitely driven some systems with truly bad tunes that were either so over assisted that it wasn't actually clear that the steering wheel was connected to anything, or the "feedback" was clearly piped in and exaggerated and not actually related to what the tires were doing. But pretty much anything else is mostly fine, especially for normal use. It's also certainly possible to do a decent job on a tune, I've driven all three 98_ generations of porsches, the first two are hydraulic assist and the third is electric, and I can't really tell a noticeable difference between them. The mazda2/fiesta are column assist and are actually done pretty reasonably, especially for low budget econoboxes. I've also driven several manual steering cars, and the most noticeable difference was the catastrophically slow steering ratio.

Then there's also the "heavy = good feedback" fallacy mentioned. That goes hand in hand with the "awful ride quality = sporty" fallacy from the suspension tuning land. Some of it is the tuners being idiots, some of it is the tuners knowing that the customers are largely idiots and won't believe the car is sporty if it doesn't ride like crap and take a huge amount of effort to steer. It's the one complaint I have about the civic type R, the suspension tune is actually very good but the R mode steering tune is clearly the "heavy for the sake of being heavy" mode.

dps214 said:

One thing that's not really accurate in the article, I don't know exact numbers but at this point a sizeable portion, if not the majority, of EPS systems are rack assist, not column assist. It is true that most of the early systems were column assist, and it's also true that the closer the assist motor is to the steering wheel, the more feedback gets filtered out. Which is part of the reason the early systems were so bad.

Really? My understanding is that almost all of these systems are column assist and rack assist is an oddity.

Edit: Researching some more, this may be due to the definition of "column assist" we're using. The vast majority do indeed act on the shaft that turns with the steering wheel, but many do this where the shaft enters the rack. A few systems use linear electric motors integrated into the rack itself but this is a rarity.

The rio SX has a nice feel. But it was weighted intentionally to "feel sporty"

GameboyRMH said:

dps214 said:

One thing that's not really accurate in the article, I don't know exact numbers but at this point a sizeable portion, if not the majority, of EPS systems are rack assist, not column assist. It is true that most of the early systems were column assist, and it's also true that the closer the assist motor is to the steering wheel, the more feedback gets filtered out. Which is part of the reason the early systems were so bad.

Really? My understanding is that almost all of these systems are column assist and rack assist is an oddity.

Edit: Researching some more, this may be due to the definition of "column assist" we're using. The vast majority do indeed act on the shaft that turns with the steering wheel, but many do this where the shaft enters the rack. A few systems use linear electric motors integrated into the rack itself but this is a rarity.

Yes, that would be rack assist, true column assist is where the motor is 6" away from the steering wheel. And the industry is very much moving towards true rack assist, because of the better feedback and direct actuation.

Keith Tanner said:

My original 1990 Miata has the most beautiful steering feel of any car I think I've ever driven. And I don't know why that car stands out even amongst other 1990 Miatas. Something with the alignment, I'm guessing. Someday I'm going to dissect it and find out why.

Fascinating, given the number you've driven.  I seem to remember that you had 16" wheels, which have since fallen out of favor in the Miata world.  Think that had anything to do with it?  Power steering or manual rack?  I'd never driven a manual rack Miata until I bought a beat up 1990 as a track car recently, and I'm shocked at how much I love the manual rack.  It gets a bad rep for the slow steering ratio, but I think Mazda got it just right.