Tesla will not offer a regular steering wheel on new Model S/X | Hacker News Reader

Tesla will not offer a regular steering wheel on new Model S/X

electrek.co

45 pointstosh116 comments

I have yet to see a positive review of the yoke steering wheel from reviewers or owners.

One magazine put a professional racing driver and car reviewer in a Tesla with a yoke steering wheel Tesla. Even on the race track, he hated it and wanted a standard steering wheel back in. From what I've seen, even the Tesla die-hard fans are scratching their heads over this decision.

This feels like the perfect example of a company's design team trying to tell customers' that their experiences and preferences are wrong, despite all evidence to the contrary.

    This feels like the perfect example of a company's
    design team trying to tell customers' that their
    experiences and preferences are wrong, despite all
    evidence to the contrary.

Clearly they're just turning it wrong.

In a slow tight turn, I suspect most people do a hand over hand turn on the sterling wheel. Not having a complete circle will mean people have to relearn years of muscle memory when a turn of the sterling wheel of more than 45° is required.

The car can be "self-driving" on Autopilot/FSD, spinning that half-wheel all around on its own, and you must be able to take over at a second's notice if the car gets into a situation it can't handle. You may easily grab air depending on how far the car rotates the yoke before demanding you grasp it in an emergency situation. I don't know that even re-learning muscle memory can make that safe.

A very good point.

Also, as Tesla says:

"Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability are intended for use with a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment. While these features are designed to become more capable over time, the currently enabled features do not make the vehicle autonomous." [1]

How do they suppose that is going to work now that you cannot let the wheel slip through your fingers? Occasions when the vehicle is making a tight turn seem to be among those events when intervention may be needed.

- Unless, of course, they don't actually expect anyone to do what they insist is necessary for safety, and this is just cynical CYA nonsense.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot#active-safety-featur...

And then let the wheel slip as the car straightens out. With this you'll end up dropping the wheel.

I wonder how they'll do, having muscle-learned the yoke, to go back to a traditional car steering wheel.

The wheel can gripped at a 360 degrees. As it rotates, it's entire surface remains grippable.

The yolk can only be gripped in some locations.

So there's no muscle memory needed to switch to a wheel.

Even so, where the rim is in relation to your hands is a function of the angle at which it is rotated.

So too is the torque and displacement of the hands needed to get a given response.

> One magazine put a professional racing driver and car reviewer in a Tesla with a yoke steering wheel Tesla. Even on the race track, he hated it and wanted a standard steering wheel back in.

That makes sense. Steering technique is taken seriously as a safety practice in racing. Honestly, steering technique should be taken more seriously in normal driving; for example the person in the lead photo in this article would be in a world of hurt if the airbag deployed with their arms crossed up like that.

Gimmicky yoke wheels have repeatedly failed to catch on for most of a century, outside of goofy kit cars, dead end concepts, and a handful of out-there exotics. Even Saab gave up on trying to come up with a not-a-round-wheel steering gimmick that wasn't awful, after decades of trying.

I seem to recall having attachments to steering wheels being illegal in Sweden. This makes me wonder if this wheel won't be illegal in a lot of places.

Go on r/Tesla and you’ll see tons

I love my Tesla Model 3 and recognize that many non-standard Musk brainfarts worked out ok(ish) in the past (gullwing doors, weird door handles, touchscreen instead of dashboard.) But one of my biggest fears is that Musk’s ideas will eventually blow up the company. This would be bad for me as a vehicle owner who wants parts and service, and more generally it would be terrible for EV competition during this stage where “traditional manufacturers” are just utterly blowing it.

There is no way I would drive a car with a wheel like this. It completely rules out the S/X if there’s no option. Between this, the awful Cybertruck, and the decision to go vision-only and remove the radar in new Teslas, I’m not confident at all that Tesla is safe from destroying their market with a few opinionated screwups.

You mean like that time he nearly closed every single showroom in the US to be online-only?

I'm seriously concerned that his mental health and ego have gone fully sideways and he is out doing what he thinks is cool rather than following any guiding light.

There is a small but growing probability of him ending up like Howard Hughes.

The traditional manufacturers have pretty much caught up already. Hyundai Ioniq 5, Kia EV6, Ford Mustang Mach-E etc. are all competitive with the model 3 (better in some ways, worse in others). There are really good electric alternatives in every price class from small urban to full blown sports car. Tesla’s not the only shop in town anymore!

I’ve been waiting for this to be true, but right now it’s still a really hard sell to move to a first-gen non-Tesla EV after owning a Tesla. Mostly this is because of the mature supercharger network, but it’s also because the non-Tesla shipping numbers are all still so pathetically low, indicating they aren’t really “in this market” yet (this matters to me both as a customer and as a person who wants to see EV adoption grow rapidly.)

What's awful about the Cybertruck?

I personally think it’s terribly ugly and somewhat impractical as a work truck. But forget what I think: Tesla has in the past adopted an attitude of “let’s make electric cars look like really attractive but conventional non-EV cars”, and it’s worked for them (and for me.) The new approach flies directly in the face of that. It’s an experiment that might succeed brilliantly or fail brilliantly, whereas a more conventional approach would probably have succeeded just as well without the failure probability. For the reasons I stated above, I think it’s a bad thing for Tesla to bet its future on such weird, risky gambles at this stage in the company’s adoption strategy.

On the other hand, I don’t like trucks and the type of culture associated with trucks, but think the Cybertruck is super cool looking. Like something out of an 80s future that will really stand out in a crowd of otherwise boring and sameish vehicles.

What culture are you referring to? The working class that uses them to build housing and operate almost every skilled labor profession? Or maybe you mean farmers who grow our food?

For either - a truck that doesn't rust and can potentially last decades could be significant money saver.

Rust is not specific to trucks, it's more tied to using salt on the roads. Vehicles from the south have significantly less rust.

Still doesn't explain what you dislike about the "culture" associated with trucks. Maybe something like South Park S10E2?

I'm not an op, but to me trucks indeed look stupid. Cybertruck looks more like an SUV.

Trucks are about utility, focusing on looks is juvenile

I guess I shouldn't be surprised as the world is slowly becoming a highschool popularity contest...

I have no utility of normal truck, but Cybertruck would be way more useful to me.

If the F-150 Lightning is a serious project for Ford (and it seems to be), it will destroy the Cyber Truck in sales because Ford knows trucks, what buyers want, and how to sell them. The Cyber Truck has limited appeal to traditional truck buyers; it's a truck for someone who wants a truck but is worried about what their liberal friends will think.

>it's a truck for someone who wants a truck but is worried about what their liberal friends will think.

This is right on the money. Can't have a truck made by the Big 3 lest your progressive credentials be ruined.

The angular shape is definitely weird, but it's awesome that it's meant to be treated like crap and hold up well. No paint to worry about scratches on, and the skin should be super durable. And maybe they'll get the glass to where they thought it should be :-) I think it's one of the better weird ideas they've had.

They now have nearly a full line of "conventional" looking cars — S, 3, X, Y, Roadster — that are still years ahead of the competition. Cybertruck may be risky as an individual product, but the future of the company isn't on the line. On the other hand, if it's successful it only further distances Tesla from other manufacturers.

To really succeed in the US they need two things: a slightly larger SUV (the Y really is barely in this category) and some much cheaper cars. Trucks are also popular but maybe not essential. Insofar as they’re devoting resources to the truck line, those resources are coming away from other priorities. They should be in every market to succeed at this point, not to take “fashion” gambles against popular (upcoming) brands like Ford’s F150 Lightning.

Not sure what you mean by slightly larger SUV — the Y is the same size as an X3, the X is the same size as an X5. Cheaper cars, sure... and clearly that will be their strategy as they scale production.

You could also argue that the Cybertruck announcement puts additional pressure on competitors. Do they write it off as a certain flop and proceed with their plans? Or do they begin designing a similar truck so that they're not once again 10 years behind if the Cybertruck is successful?

The Y is clearly designed to compete with the X3 on dimensions and price, even if it looks like a car. The X is significantly more expensive than the X5; it’s in a different price category. Plus now it comes with a weird steering wheel that my wife would never put up with, and she’s the only one in the family who would even want a large SUV.

Its design is very dangerous to people drivers hit.

I don't think we know anything about its safety performance at this point.

How is it any less safe than any other truck, van, lorry or a bus?

I've seen prisons that were more thought out and far prettier. I have a feeling if the Cybertruck had any other name than Tesla, nobody would care about it

That's entirely subjective. Aesthetically, I think it's quite thoughtful and refreshing. Car design has been absolutely boring for 20 years — each generation with more lines, more shapes, more superfluous details.

It also drives like a Ferrari and has the utility of an F150, and of course is fully electric. Why wouldn't people care about that?

Well that's why I used "I" alot...but you're right it's subjective - Ferrari or f150 aside, it's a potato to me.

If you need a truck, you get a truck for utility. If you need a Ferrari, you get a sports car. This ends up being literally the worst of both worlds. I think they could have gone simple, without looking like a oddly-cut diamond

The cybertruck is the most attractive truck ever conceived by a real car company. Traditional cars are boring and ugly by comparison, just like traditional McMansions wither in comparison to a well-architected modern building. Give me some geometry in my life, I'm sick of the stone and stucco house and smooth swept bulbous car world.

Smooth and swept = aerodynamic

I understand your point tho, even if I don't agree about the particular car. I'm all for change, but I personally don't see anything creative behind it, just an attempt to be different, which is a bad goal imho

I initially hated it but the technical explanation made the "RTX off" design less terrible for me.

The Cybertruck is made of stiff stainless steel and current techniques that make these nice, curvy shapes in today's cars can't be used. Instead, they had to bend sheet metal, which severely limited artistic freedom.

Still not a fan overall, but I respect that choice.

People who use trucks for work have reported that they won't be able to use a Cybertruck because they can't load anything from the sides, a major inconvenience.

The design is polarizing

So was the design of the iPhone, and Yeezy sneakers. How is that "awful"?

The Cybertruck wouldn't be street-legal in Europe, since it can't meet pedestrian/cyclist collision safety requirements.

Take whatever fashionable discomfort you like, but let's not increase the danger to others.

"According to EU auto standards expert Stefan Teller the Cybertruc would have to undergo 'major modifications to the basic structure' because the Cybertruck 'contradicts the European security philosophy'"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2019/12/16/tesla-cy...

How is the design of the iPhone polarizing? It looks roughly like every other smart phone out there. That just seems like a bad example of the point you're trying to make.

The Yeezy, on the other hand, does remind me of the Cybertuck!

No, every other smart phone out there looks roughly like the iPhone. When the iPhone was announced, many people thought the lack of physical buttons and keyboard was a bad idea.

The iPhone took a fairly straightforward approach, which was that to have a working touchscreen interface you need to maximize screen real estate on a phone. Once you make that decision and price the components, everything else about the design falls out: the only “design” questions are about the casing material and whether the corners should be rounded. The iPhone didn’t succeed because people thought the fashion decisions were brilliant: it succeeded because people wanted a working touch-screen phone (because even before the iPhone we all recognized that previous phones sucked for browsing the Internet.)

I can’t figure out how the Cybertruck analogizes to this. Do people need a cab that can stop small-caliber bullets? It would seem that this is not what most people are excited about. But I am sometimes wrong.

The touchscreen interface is indeed a design decision, and it was a polarizing one. Many people did _not_ want a touchscreen interface in 2007. They insisted that the physical keyboards of their blackberries were more usable and more practical. In 2007, the iPhone was a polarizing product.

The comment I responded to implied that the cybertruck is awful _because_ it's polarizing. I gave two examples of wildly successful products that were also polarizing designs.

And my point is that there is a difference between a polarizing purely-aesthetic design choice and a polarizing feature-set choice. The decision to maximize screen real estate at the cost of a physical keyboard was primarily a feature-set tradeoff. It could have gone spectacularly wrong, but the tradeoff was at least calculated around producing some tangible benefits that people already admitted they wanted. It turned out to be popular in the end because people really wanted to browse websites on their phone, and physical keyboards make it hard to build a portable phone with an acceptable screen.

Similarly, the decision to build an electric-only car vs. an ICE/plugin-hybrid car (and in the process free up space under the hood, remove gas tanks, produce a different driving experience) is also a polarizing feature-set choice that produces some aesthetic results. By contrast the design of the Cybertruck, as best I can tell, is almost entirely aesthetic in nature. Insofar as it maximizes certain features, they’re “Mad Max bulletproof indestructibility (but not the windows)” features and I’m not sure those are going to carry the mass market. And Tesla really needs to carry the mass market if they’re going to stay in business long-term. Picking weird aesthetic hills to polarize on and/or betting that what the mass market really wants us to resist small-caliber rifle attacks might work out in the end, but it sure seems like an unnecessary risk.

Rust resistance might make cybertruck very resilient machine... Only question is how is Tesla going to support them without online DRM 20-30-40 years later.

> many people thought the lack of physical buttons and keyboard was a bad idea

I still do. To this day, I often wish that my phone had them.

That's fine, I'm merely refuting the assertion that a polarizing design is inherently awful or would prevent a product from being successful.

I routinely put one hand at the 12 o'clock position on my steering wheel to make a turn, and I'm willing to bet money that I'm not exactly an outlier. The product designer within me says that this is a classic case of UI taking precedence over UX.

If you learned driving stick then you steer a bit differently anyway because you can’t rely on having both hands the entire time.

I tend to cross over going both directions now. For a turn the right hand goes to 10:30 or the left hand to 1:30. Depending on power steering, I may complete the turn with the butt of my hand, in which case the yolk is probably just short enough so that if my hand slips at all I would lose contact. There’s just not enough buffer to be comfortable.

More importantly, as I accelerate out of a turn I tend to let the wheel slip through my fingers, driven by centripetal force. It’s a smoother line with better lateral G forces for my passengers, and better tire grip.

I’ll be really interested to see if their drive by wire system breaks that, too.

UI != aesthetics

They're taking a card from Apple's playbook: intentionally creating controversy. Remove some basic functionality and refuse to give it back claiming it's better this way, causing an internet debate between diehard fans and critics, resulting in free promotion and advertising. Now everyone knows about their latest product. Just like what happened when Apple removed the headphone jack, power brick, butterfly keyboard (looks nice but terrible to use), etc.

I don’t think your theory is correct that Apple made their products worse on purpose. Hanlon’s Razor suggests it was simply Apple trying something new that didn’t turn out to be an improvement, and them taking some time to accept that internally and decide how to right the situation.

Intentionally hampering their products as a marketing stunt sounds like an awfully far fetched theory for the most valuable brand in the world with one of the most effective marketing teams.

People talk about Apple’s marketing teams from time to time but I feel like Apple is large enough they effectively don’t need one.

that shows how effective their marketing team has historically been.

Removing the headphone jack was just the method to force users to buy bluethooth buds.

This has turned out great for Apple. Air pods sell incredibly well.

It also helps reduce the number of places where water can get in your iPhone.

> Just like what happened when Apple removed the headphone jack, power brick, etc.

Ha! Where have you been? You missed quite a few decades of the “firsts” from Apple. They are the first ones to remove floppy disks, CDs from computers :-)

And the only ones that thaught it's a good idea to have only one mouse button.

The reason they removed the headphone jack was so that they could sell airpods.

The reason they removed the power brick was because they have a monopoly and it won't affect sales.

Tesla doing this doesn't seem as straight-forward. It surely is to reinforce their image as innovative and special (which removing headphone jack or power brick doesn't really do).

That's not really the Apple playbook.

Apple's moves tend to have a background of reason: The Headphone jack removal allowed for the Taptic Engine on the 7. It was a halo item for reviews when they added it. The Brick removal was an E-Waste concern that all other brands are following.

(This does not ignore the upside to Apple with the Airpods and Wall adaptors, just that there is grey here)

Then there were the prior items: Removing Apple Serial (iMac) was super controversial, it led to USB being mainstream. Removing the CD Drive on the MacBook air directly led to 10 hour battery life laptops. Removing full size ports on laptops led to a more versatile port and charging situation (if not less convenient)

Apple's moves have advantages.

This wheel is just Sci-Fi theater that doesn't do anything better.

Elon doesn't play 4D chess. Hell, he disbanded Tesla's entire PR department.

> The Headphone jack removal allowed for the Taptic Engine on the 7

Most of the space that would be taken by the headphone jack in the iPhone 7 is instead taken by the utterly useless piece of plastic called "barometric vent". And it's not like Apple engineers couldn't have figured out how to combine water resistance with a headphone jack — Samsung did that somehow. Oh, and there's plenty of space inside an iPad, but newer models also come without a headphone jack. It has to be a political decision, not a practical one. As well as their insistence on keeping Lightning a thing.

This whole situation is so ridiculous at this point — the lack of a headphone jack is now considered a flagship feature. If you have a lot of money to spend on a phone, you can't not want the unreliable mess that is bluetooth, right? And before you say it: bluetooth is not a replacement for a wired connection. And, for that matter, neither is wifi a replacement for ethernet.

Wi-Fi has entirely replaced Ethernet for me for almost 15 years. I also notice no difference these days with Bluetooth headphones. Both of these seem to act as replacements for their wired predecessors that fulfill the needs and expectations of most people. This is clearer when it comes to Ethernet, as the advantage of wireless networking is far greater than the advantage of wireless earphones. What more do you need to consider these replacements?

There's nothing that can fix them for me. They're unreliable by virtue of being wireless and using a medium shared with many similar devices as well as things like microwaves. Wired connections don't have that problem — either they work or they don't because the cable broke or the connector isn't all the way in. They're much easier to troubleshoot because your devices aren't connected by invisible ether and common state in their memory, you can actually see and touch the thing that connects them.

Besides, I just don't trust the connection that is managed by software. Complex, proprietary software, that implements thousands pages worth of specifications. Where you would simply insert a plug into a jack and be done with it, in this "future" you now need to go through menus and click buttons, some of which sometimes do nothing, when your headphones won't connect to your phone. And don't even get me started on using the same headphones with more than one device. It's a ridiculous mess.

Then I just don't want my headphones to have a firmware and a CPU. I also don't want them to have a battery that ages and needs charging.

Bluetooth will never work for applications that require low audio latency, such as pro audio software or rhythm games. Even in the best case, BT latency seems to be on the order of 50-100ms.

I once lived in an apartment where I saw 45 simultaneously active wifi networks. Not even in a skyscraper, only an ordinary 3 story building in a residential street. It wasn't fun, even on 5 GHz it constantly disconnected.

Video showing someone adding the headphone jack back to an iPhone 7.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA

The headphone jack did not make space for the taptic engine; it made space for a piece of plastic.

Well you put it much better than I could have. I had come to say the same

Blinkers and horn being button s and removal of the top grab area is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen changed in a car.

Horns are already a button in some cars, presumably to make way for an airbag. You don't want your palm on the center of the wheel when that airbag goes off.

Would be great if the horns could be disabled in cities from cab and uber drivers remotely. Like you get 3 horns per day and then were shutting you down. None of them own teslas yet but one day maybe.

They could offer a subscription plan for unlimited honks for a small monthly fee

Geofencing. You are entering a horn free community...

Yoke steering wheels have been done to death. Almost always, they're a gimmick intended to highlight the edgy design of a kit car or exotic outlier. Less often, they're a workaround for bad cockpit design that fails to account for a standard steering wheel [0] [1]. Rarest of all, a yoke steering wheel ends up being used in a production car, without a trace of irony, failure, or gimmickery [2].

Tesla is recycling a feature that first went into mass automotive production in 1955. The 1980's did it better though [3] [4].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Allegro#Reputation

[1] <ahem> https://electrek.co/2021/07/23/elon-musk-confirms-tesla-not-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_KR200

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KITT#/media/File:KITT_Interior...

[4] https://www.thedrive.com/news/33416/the-1986-oldsmobile-inca...

Airbag safety seems to be worse with a yoke compared to a wheel. The yoke essentially forces you to cross over your arms for some turns, putting your forearm in the way of the airbag, and you don’t want the airbag smashing your arm into your face. Of course, with a wheel you can slide your hands on each side of the wheel, never crossing them over unless you choose to.

Curious whether they could take this even further.

I've always wanted to try driving where turning uses absolute position rather than relative motion on the steering column to determine wheel rotation, like an analog stick in a driving game: rotate fully to the right and the gear box will push the wheels continuously to the right; let go and the yoke would snap back to neutral, and the gear box would then work with sensors to bring the wheels to a straight-forward neutral position. The absolute yaw of the yoke at any moment should be reflected in the absolute yaw of the wheels.

I'd also be curious, given a flight yoke, to try controlling acceleration (not velocity!) using the Z dimension of the yoke, like actual planes do — maybe not with actual travel, but just with strain gauges on the shaft of the yoke to detect how hard you're pushing/pulling on it. Push to accelerate; pull to decelerate; relax to cruise.

That sounds tiring and painful. Heel of your foot helps to stabilize the throttle actuation. Your hands would be hanging in the air.

Also there is this - accelerate accidentally while also turning.

There is absolutely zero need to reinvent the car UI/UX. Don’t try to fix what’s not broken.

We were talking about "driving", but who said anything about cars? ;)

"Giving strategic-level input to the AI that drives around the self-driving vehicle that you have final responsibility over" doesn't necessarily have much to do with "driving a car."

"Being the remote operator who steps in to remote-drive a self-driving vehicle when the AI can't figure out what to do" has even less to do with "driving a car." (Presuming they don't give each remote operator a full 360° driving simulator, it's only going to be about as immersive as a video game, anyway.)

IMHO, it's only natural to begin re-thinking "car" UI/UX for those cases. Especially for the future generations who will be born into an era where they may "learn to drive" and then "drive" all their lives, never using any car other than self-driving ones.

It's only during this transitional era, where autonomous driver AI isn't very good and needs constant manual input — and where the majority of people who own self-driving cars have also owned "hand-driven" cars — that it would seem to be a good idea to give input to a driving AI using hand-driven car inputs.

There is absolutely zero need to reinvent the car UI/UX. Don’t try to fix what’s not broken.

While nobody has yet improved significantly on the traditional control layout of gas/brake/[clutch]/wheel, I still think as a matter of principle that it's really unlikely we are at the global optimum. Thus, experimentation should always be on the table, as long as it's optional.

Even if we're not at global optimum, we've got some billions of users that are used to the current UX/UI.

Push to accelerate; pull to decelerate; relax to cruise.

I've had similar ideas for speed control, but with something in the gear/handbrake area. The problem I couldn't solve was choosing an orientation and response curve that didn't make it so acceleration made it hard to brake, and braking didn't make it hard to change the amount of braking, while still feeling cool (i.e. not left/right oriented).

My thought would be that "choosing to accelerate [more/less]" and "choosing to brake [more/less]" are strategic-level decisions; and, if you have a self-driving car, the tactical-level fine input of how much more/less can be handled for you.

Kind of like what's going on with mouse-"controlled" movement in this AI gameplay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYluZRwrw9w

Or, to put that another way: the car already has a (low-confidence) idea that there's an obstacle in the path, and so it already has a "possible plan" to brake hard to stop in time to not collide with the obstacle. You just have to choose that plan — declare your strategy — by pulling back on the yoke. It then executes on the plan.

Joystick steering, with thumb and trigger controls. Good times to be had!

https://www.komatsuamerica.com/equipment/wheelloaders/large/...

Funny enough I just recently went to training that demonstrated how hand-over-hand steering is a requirement for effective skid recovery.

I never thought I would abandon thoughts of owning a car based solely on the steering wheel, but as I live in a place where it snows....I was wrong.

If the steering ratio is smaller, so something like 90 degrees is full lock, you could maybe get away without hand-over-hand.

The ratio is 14.0:1, with 2.3 turns lock to lock[1,2]

[1] https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/2022-tesla-model-s-plaid-...

[2] https://electrek.co/2021/07/23/elon-musk-confirms-tesla-not-...

The steering ratio is 14.0:1 or 2.3 lock to lock so no-go.

Consumers complain about faster steering ratios being darty so I doubt anyone but the Italians will go with faster ratios.

There were apparently some hidden photos on Tesla's site of the car with a normal steering wheel...

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/38976/tesla-site-code-shows-th...

The trick was to replace $STOY with $ST03 in this url, but it appears Tesla blocked that:

  https://static-assets.tesla.com/configurator/compositor?&options=$PBSB,$IBC00,$ST0Y&view=INTERIOR&model=ms&size=1920

They also had a Plaid prototype with a normal wheel - https://imgur.com/a/AToY8rb

I don’t have latest update on Tesla’s right-to-repair in the aftermarket case, the yoke steering wheel replacement with the practical one - makes perfect business idea to pursue

Tesla churns out S/X in the very low thousands, so not a lot of potential customers.

Luckily the Taycan has a nice steering wheel.

Lol it looks like Elon is just trying to live out his childhood fantasy of driving KIT from KnightRider!

The visibility of gauges issue is a real concern - I've been fluxxomed by this for all cars I've driven in recent history, where I can't see various gauges due to the top of the wheel blocking them.

I’m 6’7” and I’ve never thought about visibility of the gauges. During a turn what do you need to see the gauge cluster for? Your eyes should be on the road.

At some heights, in some cars, the wheel blocks the speedometer all the time, so you have to duck and bob to know if you're going too slow or too fast if there's no traffic to blend with.

Have you tried adjusting the height of the wheel? I can't think of a car in which you can't do that.

Yes - for ergonomics.

And yet the yoke is so wide that it blocks the center screen and especially the gear selector part of it.

Yet the Model 3 and Y don't even have gauges. So are gauges important to see or not?

Real concern?

Steering wheels are adjustable…

Do you then adjust the wheel for comfort of visibility of the instrument display?

The displays are more important. Besides, you can also adjust the seat to make the wheel position comfortable regardless of where the wheel is.

When I adjust it so the wheel's at a comfortable height, it blocks instruments.

> Musk insists that the yoke steering wheel is worth it for offering better visibility of the instrument cluster and its driving visualizations.

optimizing for internal distractions over steering the vehicle...

My bet is this will change when accidents start happening at a higher rate. A class action lawsuit combined with NHTSA investigation would be brutally effective.

Flat out, the steering device shown is unsafe. We will read about this decision sometime in the near future.

The Knight Rider auto had one of these. K.A.R.R. But it wasn't a friendly car.

Model S/X really?!

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