Removable Steering Wheel

A gag in comedies involving driving has the driver removing the steering wheel by accidentally or intentionally letting someone Take the Wheel. Often this means the vehicle will go out of control.

Often happens with The Alleged Car.

Examples of Removable Steering Wheel include:

Anime & Manga

• Goku does this in one of Dragonball Z's later Filler episodes, while taking his driver's license test.

Comic Books

• The Ghost Rider had an incident when he was fighting a thug attacking a circus with a massive earthmover vehicle and he manages to get into the control compartment. As they fight for the controls, the thug sees the vehicle moving towards to some place undesirable and pleads with the demon superhero to give him the wheel. The Rider obliges him by ripping out the entire steering column, but the fainting thug doesn't notice that the Rider was also hitting the brake pedal at the same time to bring the vehicle to a stop.
• Watchmen: Nite Owl II's transport has a removable steering column; he uses it on the roof of the transport when he & Laurie rescue a bunch of people from a burning building and they run out of room on the inside.

Film

• Variation: in Go West, the Marx Brothers are on a runaway train. Chico yells to Harpo, "Brake! The brake!" So Harpo breaks the brake.
• In the W. C. Fields film The Bank Dick (1940), when asked by the thug in the back seat to give him the wheel, Egbert Souse (Fields) matter-of-factly pulled it off the steering column and gave it to him. This sequence paid homage to the Mack Sennett/Keystone Cops and Hal Roach/Our Gang comedies of the 1920s and 1930s. Model T Fords were generally used for these comic chases.
• Taxi (US Remake): Belle has one, but it's so she can change her taxi steering wheel for a professional steering wheel. This also happened in the original.
• In Moonraker, Jaws and some mooks are chasing James Bond in a speedboat when Jaws takes the wheel a little too literally.
• In Rush Hour, Jackie Chan's character removes the wheel from Chris Tucker's character's car after being handcuffed to it.
• In the Cat in The Hat live action movie, the cat and two kids are in the middle of a car chase when not only does the cat literally give one kid the wheel, but also fabricates a new one, so they're driving one car with two separate wheels.
• In the animated One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Horace and Jasper panic and tear the wheel off their truck when they're about to crash into Cruella.
• Happens in Jonah: a Veggie Tales Movie: Mr. Asparagus gets his guitar neck caught in the van's steering wheel and wrenches it off trying to get unstuck. Bob is able to plug it back in just in time to swerve to avoid two accidents—but not before losing all four of their tires to an angry mother porcupine.
• In The Muppet Movie, Fozzie accidentally pulls the steering wheel off the car when trying to chase down Gonzo, who is floating on a bunch of balloons.

Jokes

• In a humorous anecdote that turned up in at least one published collection early in the 20th century, a driver with a penchant for practical jokes had one of these in his car, along with a bar installed in the steering column that would allow him to steer with his knees. Any time he had a passenger in his car for the first time, he would fake getting ill and tell the passenger "Here, you take the wheel!" He'd then yank the steering wheel off and hand it to the panicking passenger.

Literature

• The Yawning Heights by Alexander Zinoviev had one cadet telling the story about another in his academy. The guy was a decent pilot, but afraid to land, and his instructor planned a sneaky move—to remove his stick in flight, so that the student would have to land their plane on his own. But the cadet heard about that and took a spare. And when the instructor shown him his disconnected stick and threw it out, the student also shown him a stick and threw it out.

Live Action TV

• Mr. Bean does this on purpose whenever he parks, so his car won't get stolen. It works: In one episode, we see an actual car thief going so far as to jump-start the car only to realize that the wheel is missing.
• Has happened a number of times on Top Gear, usually when they are messing around with very cheap cars they have acquired for their projects.
• In one "Handyman Corner" segment of The Red Green Show Red customized a car to have (among other things) an intentionally removable steering wheel (really a collapsable strainer) to be used as part of an anti-theft device. After all, who would steal a car that has no steering wheel?

Western Animation

• A Doug cartoon once included a fantasy in which Doug and Skeeter were truck drivers. Skeeter's request to take the wheel ends up with Doug giving it to him.
• Wallace and Gromit's van in A Matter of Loaf and Death has a steering wheel that can be removed, and plugged into the passenger's dashboard and used.
• In one of The New Scooby Doo Movies, a dim Globetrotter, when told to 'turn the wheel around' on a ship, takes the helm of its spot and puts it on the other side.

Real Life

• Most modern racing cars have quick-release removable steering wheels to save space and to aid safety - it's much easier to quickly jump out of, or extracate an injured driver from a cramped racing car without a steering wheel in the way. The racers attach the steering wheel after they get in the car and remove it before they get out.
• These are available for use in older collectible cars (before locking steering mechanisms became standard) as an anti-theft device.