BMW M Performance LED Steering Wheel
Performance LED Steering Wheel
Taking your BMW M series car out on the track is a great excuse to daydream that you’re Michael Schumacher at the wheel of a Formula 1 racer. If you really want to accentuate the sense of speed, you can even replace your steering wheel with one straight from the factory that gives you all the racing-related info you could ever need in front of you. The new BMW M PERFORMANCE LED STEERING WHEEL from Kies Motorsports is just that, and it’s quite possibly the most over-the-top modification you can get directly from BMW.
The wheel is essentially a regular M leather Buy BMW steering wheels wrapped in carbon fiber with an LCD screen on the top of the rim that gives you information on your vehicle and enables you to control various functions. There are three modes that you can toggle between, each providing different readouts. ECO mode is all about getting the best fuel economy and displays readouts such as average speed, engine speed, water and oil temperature, as well as gear shift indicator prompts (which also display the current RPM on the instrument cluster).
Sport mode provides a variety of data such as lap times, 0-60 and quarter mile speeds, lateral and longitudinal acceleration values, plus a stopwatch with memory function to record your driving performance. There’s also a g-force meter that will show you how much your car is accelerating in each direction. You can even set the g-meter to be displayed to the nearest 100th of a second!
BMW M Performance LED Steering Wheel
Finally, there’s the Race mode. This is where the fun begins. The LED’s start doing a light dance and the information is more specific to your vehicle. This includes engine temperature and a display of the driver’s personal settings like the RPM threshold that triggers the shift lights. It’s also possible to set the steering wheel display to metric or imperial units, change the color of the LED’s, and adjust the brightness of the display.
All of this makes the wheel a bit of an overkill for everyday use, but you have to admit that it looks pretty cool. The LED’s are bright enough to be visible in sunlight and the wheel is finished in alcantara with BMW M colored stitching. The only downside is that you have to press and hold the L and R buttons in order to turn the screen on, which can be a bit cumbersome at first. It also takes a little while to learn the various button combinations for the various menus.
It’s not a cheap addition to your BMW, but it’s a nice way to get the racing feel in your car without going the full F1 route and spending US$50,000 on an actual race steering wheel from Ferrari. Pricing for the BMW M PERFORMANCE LED STEERING Wheel starts at $800. Click here for more details.