JAMES DOUGLAS MUIR LENO MUSEUM OF STEERING WHEELS

Curving poured-concrete museum in the Malibu hills above the Pacific Coast Highway with ordinary autonomous vehicles below.

Experimental red Ford steering wheel assembly with two small circular hand wheels and metal hubs, isolated on a white background.

A CELEBRATION OF WHAT ONCE WAS

A museum built to celebrate manual, traditional driving.

“I built The Museum of Steering Wheels to reminds us that, even in a world of autonomous vehicles, the wheel, the gear shift lever, the ashtray, and the habits around them were once central to the way we moved in the world.” — Jay Leno

A Few Items From Our Collection

On view now

Original steering “wheels’ from our one-of-a-kind archive.

A Saturn Ion steering wheel with a black rim and center emblem.

Saturn IonEveryday compact / collection

01 / 06

Toyota SiennaTrad family vibes / collection

02 / 06

Mercedes-Benz “Creepy Grimace”Unsettling pareidolia / collection

03 / 06

A Ford Taurus steering wheel with a dark rim and integrated controls.

Ford TaurusControl buttons / collection

04 / 06

SAAB ConvertibleOpen air / collection

05 / 06

Subaru ImprezaTextured grip / collection

06 / 06

Black Tesla Model S/X steering wheel with chrome trim and integrated controls isolated on a white background.

Tesla Model S/XWeird inexplicable / wtf collection

07 / 06

Isolated black Citroën C4 Picasso steering wheel with central chevrons and integrated controls on a white background.

Citroën C4 PicassoFor big hands / wtf collection

08 / 06

Isolated dark Subaru XT6 steering wheel with a rectangular hub and integrated RESUME and SET/COAST controls on a white background.

Subaru XT6Asymmetric / wtf collection

09 / 06

Two white-gloved curators and three children study a broad cross-folded road map; only one child points while the others hold the map, and a curator holds the completed long narrow folded packet beside a Thomas Guide and TripTik case.

Paper navigation / map collection

Folding Maps and Paper Guides

Before directions lived in the car's GPS mapping algorithm, a family trip might begin with a Texaco folding paper map spread out on the hood of the car, or in the hands of the passenger who would have to roll their window down to keep it from blowing away. This collection brings together a collection of rare and vintage paper maps, street guides, TripTik route booklets that were the essence of automotive wayfinding. Try our fold-the-map challenge while a voice tells you what you're doing wrong and see how good a navigator you would've been!

Vintage Thomas GuidesStreet atlases that made sure you got where you were going, if you could find out where you were to start with.
AAA TripTiksRoute booklets that made the yellow highlighter an icon of the road trip.
Frommer’s GuidesThe classic “practical companions” for getting somewhere and finding your way around.
Beat the Clock Gas Station Map Folding GamesChallenge yourself against the clock to properly fold an unfurled and sprawled map while a fan simulates the wind from an open car window.

Interactive exhibits / try the controls

Take the steering wheel.

Do the things your grandpa once got to do behind “the wheel”.

Parallel Parking

Technically your car should fit!

A visitor turns a steering wheel through a small K-turn course while a family watches and smiles.

The Fabled “K” Turn

Pick the wide street for practice, and see how you do on the narrow street when you feel ready!

A visitor prepares to drive straight up a steep hill on a manual-transmission simulator while a guide and visitors watch.

Hill Start

See if you can start on the hill without rolling back!

Lombard Street

Eight turns as fast as you can! Mind the shrubbery!

A visitor drives a compact car through a tight vertical parking-garage simulator while a guide and visitors watch.

The “Parking Garage”

See how fast you can spiral down the parking ramp without throwing up!

A visitor practices controlled donuts on a snowy parking-lot simulator while a guide and visitors watch from behind a rail.

Snowy Donuts

Try not to drift into a lamp post! 21+ can try after a few whiskies at our Museum bar and win a prize!

A friendly motorcycle officer role-plays a traffic stop beside a museum driving simulator while visitors watch.

Felony Traffic Stop (LA County)

Get “pulled over” by a well-armed police officer. License, registration, and a keep 'em where I can see 'em!

A visitor times a horn reaction behind another car as a museum traffic signal turns green while onlookers watch.

Honk Reaction

See how fast you can honk at the guy in front after the Red light turns Green!

Driving on Screen / Friday evenings

We used to call it “the driver's seat.”

Films where the wheel was turned and how that turned the story: heroic, frightened, confused, comic, criminal, and lost.

“The era of the car chase and road film is over. How can two algorithms chase each other, really? We used to spend entire days just filming a foot stomping on a clutch or brake pedal, or a gloved hand shifting from 4th gear to 3rd gear. Just to get a camera in there was four or five grips for 6 hours, more if you want to get it right the first time. I mean, once I spent an entire weekend just filming a hand brake pull. I'll be glad to not have to do that anymore, quite frankly.” — Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC

Talladega Nights film still with a racing driver at the wheel. — **Talladega Nights**2006 / 108 min

01 / 17

Special Exhibit: They Used To Smoke Cigars and Cigarettes While Driving.

On display through April.

Driving with one hand took patience and practice. Cigar and cigarettes were a regular fixture for drivers who would enjoy their leisure time smoking, driving, and drinking booze and beer. Nowadays, the car drives for you so it's not such a big deal to be doing something else — reading, sleeping, a game of canasta, or just scrolling feeds. But back then, this was considered as dangerous as it was cool.

Isolated rectangular dark metal automobile ashtray with a worn chrome rim on a white museum catalog background.

Isolated hinged chrome-lined automobile ashtray compartment with its transparent lid raised on a white museum catalog background.

Isolated compact seatback-mounted automobile ashtray with a rectangular chrome-trimmed flap on a white museum catalog background.

Isolated chrome-trimmed door-panel automobile ashtray assembly on a white museum catalog background.

Plan your visit

The history of the “driver's seat” awaits you.

Open daily / 10:00–18:0027880 Pacific Coast Highway / Malibu, CA 90265Films every Friday / 18:00 onward

Self-driving futures

A museum as a speculative artifact

When autonomous vehicles are normal, ordinary, and everyday how will traditional driving be understood?

This is a speculative artifact designed to provide context around a world of autonomous vehicles, starting with the one instrument that will become less and less relevant, like the gear shift lever and ashtray, over time.

The idea of a museum that presents remnants from the era of manually driven vehicles.

You may see this as satire or a joke. That is part of how the artifact works. Humor gives people enough distance from the humorless aspects of innovation to approach a change that might otherwise remain abstract or difficult to discuss. Cultural forms can tell us significant things about ourselves through that distance, which is the work humor performs in any case.

The “Museum” examines what follows on in the world when autonomous vehicles become ubiquitous and the steering wheel disappears from daily life. The museum gives that disappearance a form within culture — a way for people to engage with and reflect on the implications of this shift. It opens questions about driving skill, bodily memory of place and transit, licensing (driver’s license or occupant’s license?) policing, safety education, aftermarket culture, brand identity, and the meaning of control.

The Museum gives those questions a familiar setting. Its exhibits and interactive jokes let a team experience the absence of the steering wheel as a cultural and institutional change alongside the technical change. The artifact makes the consequence available to the senses.

So, some will say that doing an artifact like this, taking the time to think it through, conjure the presentation, etc., to be a luxury. But the value of doing this sits in the range of the consequences — the things that follow — that this kind of work makes available for examination, or for studying, or for finding the previously unknown angles or opportunities.

Autonomous vehicles change what people do, remember, understand, regulate, buy, and identify with. This artifact in the form it has taken gives that change a recognizable material and cultural form. Humor is the way to wonder and wander into the subject; the questions are what the artifact carries from its future to us here today.

p.s. I just added the films-of-driving as a curiosity — will the car chase go away in the future of film?

Some Notes & Remarks

Autonomous vehicle notes that help ground the speculative artifact in real-world considerations and ongoing discussions about the future of mobility. These are ways of connecting the fictional elements of the museum to the kinds of things, rituals, recollections, associations that might follow on — actual trends, futures, research, and debates in the field of autonomous vehicles.

Some References & Signals

Should Road Signs Change for Self-Driving Cars?1 source
The arrival of self-driving cars raises a design question about road signs: should construction signs and other street communications include machine-readable codes or new typographic systems? The item frames autonomous mobility as a change to the shared visual environment, requiring roads to communicate with humans and machines.

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James Bridle / Autonomous Trap 0011 source
James Bridle’s “Autonomous Trap 001” uses road markings and no-entry glyphs to test whether an autonomous vehicle interprets a scene as a human would. The artwork turns machine perception, signage, and the limits of automated safety into a public experiment.

Autonomous Trap 001
Protesters develop novel way to build cone-sensus against driverless cars1 source
San Francisco’s Safe Street Rebel used traffic cones placed on driverless taxis as a humorous protest against autonomous-vehicle expansion. The action brought pedestrian safety, congestion, regulation, public acceptance, and grassroots resistance into the same urban scene.

San Francisco Autonomous Cars Protest Cone
Waymo Cars, Honey Bears, and the Future of San Francisco1 source
A reflection on Waymo vehicles entering San Francisco’s streets alongside local cultural symbols and uneven social conditions. The item connects autonomous mobility to public acceptance, privacy, urban planning, community identity, and the question of how technological change sits within an existing city.

Waymo Cars And Honey Bears
SF parents new hack: Sending kids off solo in a Waymo1 source
Some San Francisco parents use Waymo robotaxis to send teenagers across the city without an accompanying adult. The practice shows how autonomous rides can redistribute family independence and parental oversight while testing company rules, trust, safety expectations, and the boundaries of urban childhood.

Waymo Parents Kids In Robotaxis
Wrong Road — Real Life1 source
A history of how streetcars, automobiles, lobbying, highways, suburbs, parking, and real-estate systems reshaped cities and social behavior. It provides a longer cultural frame for considering the steering wheel as part of an infrastructure that organized identity, mobility, land use, and everyday life.

Wrong Road
Design Fiction in a Corporate Setting1 source
A case study of a Mercedes-Benz collaboration that used stories and 24 artifacts, including city maps and quick-start guides, to explore a near-future self-driving car. The project shows how artifacts can expose experiences and stakeholders while also revealing the pressure corporate product goals place on speculative work.

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Cars Clock In After Their Owners Go To Sleep1 source
An Adjacency report on private owners retrofitting ordinary pre-autonomy cars with open-source autonomy kits and sending them into after-hours taxi service, bringing DIY culture, gray markets, regulation, and competing ideas of public trust into the autonomous-vehicle economy.

Taxi Mode Tradmobiles 59e0bae4dcad301dc43710d0
Delivery Stewards Help Mitigate the Curbside Chaos of Autonomous Delivery1 source
An Adjacency report about a new human labor category created around autonomous cargo vehicles. Delivery stewards manage theft, liability, blocked sidewalks, unexpected obstacles, and the social judgment required in the last fifty feet of automated delivery.

Delivery Stewards And Autonomous Vehicles 4a4fd1e150b5408289a04a9a
The Towns Going Robot-Unreadable1 source
An Adjacency report on towns and neighborhoods redesigning ordinary streets around human legibility, local knowledge, manual-driving zones, and deliberate resistance to autonomous-vehicle fluency.

Robot Unreadable Towns 1cd2f246787ae4c576c996e4
Geneva Map for an Autonomous Vehicle Future1 source
A Near Future Laboratory Design Fiction project from the nfl-backoffice project archive: a plausible printed map of Geneva designed for autonomous vehicles, used to examine how automated mobility could reshape urban space, infrastructure, signage, rules, services, and everyday movement.

Geneva Map For An Av Future
Quick Start Guide for a Self Driving Car1 source
An IxDA 2015 Design Fiction workshop with CCA students and conference participants that used a fictional self-driving car quick-start guide to work through its systems, interactions, human questions, and everyday contingencies.

Qsg For A Self Driving Car
Car and Driverless1 source
A 72-page Design Fiction magazine for Motional and Hyundai, published as Autonome Magazine: a vivid representation of a future where autonomous vehicles are ordinary, shaped through strategic research, interviews, workshops, and implications for society, markets, infrastructure, and everyday life.

Car And Driverless
Who Is At The Controls?1 source
An Adjacency municipal-court report about a home-brew autonomous truck whose speeding ticket becomes a test of responsibility between operators, open-source software, autonomous systems, and the companies that rely on them.

Who Is At The Controls fc7362298c1bb51023007609
The World of Self-Driving Cars1 source
Near Future Laboratory’s design-fiction quick-start guide for the fictional Amazon Helios:Pilot treats the self-driving car as an everyday product ecosystem. It explores user instructions, geo-fencing, Child Safe Mode, emergency maneuvers, subscriptions, insurance plug-ins, and the awkward situations created when driving becomes an automated service.

The World Of Self Driving Cars b1f7ade18931