[quote=flu]Sorry… I defer to you… I’m still under warranty so I haven’t had a need to take it apart yet… The ridiculous gimmick is that you can set the thing to sports+ mode (or something like that) and it “simulates” a road feel… Not really….Disconnected from reality imho… Well not my car, my dad’s… And he likes it so that’s all that matters…[/quote] Actually it doesn’t “simulate” road feel. My understanding is that it reduces the ‘assist’. When you reduce assist, more road feel/vibration gets back up through the steering.

Going back to the “Saginaw” steering, one of the things that hot-rodders would do to get steering feel back into old GM steering boxes, would be to take apart the steering box and swap torque rods withing the Saginaw steering box, increasing the strength of the torque rod. This would cause you to still have power steering, but the power steering effort would be increased.. you could no longer spin the steering wheel around with one finger while the car was not moving. The benefit was much better road feel and driving precision. It would cure the vague on center feel that GM vehicles had.

Note that the swap on the Saginaw box required dismantling the box to change the feel.. and it was a ‘permanent’ change. BMW is trying to make it such that the feel can be adjusted on the fly (when driving)… their implementation though, still needs work. Maserati also tried something like this on their Khamsin. (ironically, the steering system was designed by Citroën – see DIRAVI)