Continuous health monitoring in a vehicle enables the earlier detection of symptoms of cardiovascular diseases. In this work, we designed flexible and thin electrodes made of polyurethane for long‐term electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring while driving. We determined the time for reliable ECG recording to evaluate the effectiveness of the electrodes. We recorded data from 19 subjects under four scenarios: rest, city, highway, and rural. The recording time was five min for rest and 15 min for the other scenarios. The total recording (950 min) is publicly available under a CC BY‐ND 4.0 license. We used the simultaneous truth and performance level estimation (STAPLE) algorithm to detect the position of R‐waves. Then, we derived the RR intervals to compare the estimated heart rate with the ground truth, which we obtained from ECG electrodes on the chest. We calculated the signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR) and averaged it for the different scenarios. Highway had the lowest SNR (−6.69 dB) and rural had the highest (−6.80 dB). The usable time of the steering wheel was 42.46% (city), 46.67% (highway), and 47.72% (rural). This indicates that steering‐wheel‐based ECG recording is feasible and delivers reliable recordings from about 45.62% of the driving time. In summary, the developed electrodes allow continuous in‐vehicle heart rate monitoring, and our publicly available recordings provide the opportunity to apply more sophisticated data analytics. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.