Mercedes-Benz brings digital steering to the refreshed EQS

06 April 2026

Mercedes-Benz is celebrating 140 years of building cars. For most of those years, if you turned the steering wheel, a metal rod physically moved the front tires. It's a simple system that works very well in millions of cars all over the world. But the German automaker decided it was time to change how electric cars feel to drive. In the newest version of the EQS, Mercedes-Benz is removing that metal connection, and instead, we get wires and computers to tell the wheels which way to go.

The technology is called steer-by-wire. Mercedes-Benz is the first German company to put this in a car people can actually buy. In many ways, it makes the EQS feel more like a video game than a traditional machine. When you turn the steering wheel, a sensor reads your movement and sends a digital signal to an electric motor, which then moves the wheels for you. It sounds complicated (and it is), but the company says it makes driving much easier for the person behind the wheel.

One big benefit of this system is that it stops the steering wheel from shaking. Usually, when a car hits a pothole or drives over a rough road, the vibrations travel up the steering column and rattle your hands. Because there is no longer a physical connection in the EQS, those vibrations never reach the driver. The computer calculates how much "push back" the driver should feel so it still feels like a real car, but it filters out the bad parts of the road.

Parking a large car can be a chore, but this new technology helps with that, too. In older cars, you might have to spin the steering wheel several times to get around a tight corner or into a parking spot. With steer-by-wire, the car can change how sensitive the steering is based on how fast you are going. At low speeds, you only have to turn the wheel a little bit to make the wheels turn a lot. You will not have to cross your arms or struggle to grab the wheel while navigating a garage.

The design of the interior changes because of this tech, too. The steering wheel in the Mercedes-Benz EQS is no longer a wheel - it looks a bit like something from a spaceship. Because the "wheel" is smaller, there is more room for the driver's legs. It is also easier to see the digital screens on the dashboard. Mercedes likes to call their car cabins a "home away from home," and having more space certainly helps that feeling.

Some people might worry about what happens if the computer stops working. If a wire breaks, does the car just go straight? Mercedes-Benz thought about this and built several safety nets. There are two separate signal paths for every command. If one fails, the other takes over instantly. Even if the entire steering system somehow lost power, it can use the brakes on individual wheels or use the rear-axle steering to help the driver keep control and pull over safely.

The EQS also has a rear-steering system with the back wheels that can turn up to 10 degrees. When you drive fast on the highway, the back wheels turn the same way as the front wheels to keep the car steady. When you are trying to park, they turn the opposite way to make the car feel smaller and more agile. Combining this with the new digital front steering makes this one of the most advanced electric cars on the road today.

Surprisingly, changing the shape of the steering wheel actually created a weird problem for safety engineers. Usually, an airbag uses the round rim of the steering wheel for support when it blows up during a crash. Since the new wheel is flat both on top and bottom, there is no rim to lean on (the reason why China banned this design). The engineers had to invent a new kind of airbag that holds its own shape using a special folding pattern. It is a lot of extra work just to make the steering wheel look cool, but that is the level of detail Mercedes-Benz puts into its EVs.

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