This Ferrari supercar from the early 2000’s really did share a steering wheel with a Honda Civic Type R.
Spend $200,000 dollars on an exotic car two decades ago and you’d expect every single thing you touch be bespoke, expensive, and above and beyond anything on the market of the time. Not so when it came to some exotics. Earlier today (Jan. 19,2019) I came across a piece of pub trivia about Ferraris that blew my mind. The infamous Ferrari 550, successor to the Rad Testarossa, had the same steering wheel as a much lesser Honda Civic Type R of the same year.
Want some proof? Compare these two interiors for yourself below.
Here’s the 550’s interior.
And here’s the Honda Civic Type R’s interior.
Notice any similarities? That’s right, the steering wheels are exactly the same, well, except for the logos in the center.
Here they are side-by-side.
What’s even more hilarious is if you go on the eBay and search for either steering wheel, you’ll come up with some drastically different prices between the two despite the steering wheels being entirely the same.
Here’s a 550 steering wheel that sold well over a thousand.
And here’s a Civic Type R steering wheel that you can get for a quarter of the price.
The steering wheel is made by Momo, a design company that supplies the OEM and aftermarket with parts and accessories that goes back to 1964. Headquartered in Milan, Italy, it would make sense for Ferrari to choose a Momo steering wheel. In all likelihood, it was Honda who wanted to copy the best when it came to racing gear and took their supply parts bin inspiration from Ferrari.
One’s a hot hatch that doesn’t even crack 200 HP sent to the front wheels and the other is a fire-breathing grand tourer with a honking V12 that, in 1996, made 485 HP in all its naturally aspirated goodness.
A good steering wheel is a good steering wheel no matter what car it’s in. Around the turn of the century, cars were still analog machines with technology slowly creeping its way into the interior here and there. The most complicated buttons you’d see on a wheel operated the cruise control if anything.
Today, this sort of parts bin swapping probably wouldn’t fly but for one brief moment in the late 90s and early 00’s, a hot econobox and a Ferrari had the same parts.
Source: Honda-Tech
