Steering wheel upgrade options?

[geoffco]

Hi folks,

My old, soon to be sold, car is a Volvo V50 and many years ago I upgraded the steering wheel to their premium 'R-Design' wheel.. It made a big difference to the feel and comfort of driving. I had to drive the old car a little this weekend and really noticed how nice that steering wheel actually is, so I started wondering what my options would be for a similar upgrade in the B8 Passat...

We like the flat bottom of the stock wheel on our Passat, but would ideally like something a bit thicker with more pronounced 'thumbrests'... What are my options? My car is a manual, so no need to mess with DSG paddles etc. The R-Line wheel looks like the right kind of thing, and not /all/ of them on eBay are outrageously expensive, but are any of the other VW car's wheels directly swappable, or even Skoda / Audi ones?

Also, if I do get, one can I assume that like with the Volvo, I can just transfer the airbag and switch blocks over and all is fine? Is there a good write-up of someone doing this somewhere to know how to do it? I remember there was a little trick to getting the Volvo airbag to opo out of the centre nicely and if I hadn't known it )and followied the Haynes manual etc) it would have been a lot harder to do!

Cheers,
Geoff