Tesla's New Steering Yoke Shows Little Benefit and Potential Safety Pitfalls | Hacker News Reader

Tesla's New Steering Yoke Shows Little Benefit and Potential Safety Pitfalls

consumerreports.org

57 pointsjustin6624 comments

Yoke and touch-based gear shifting was a subject of weekly (if not daily) threads on /r/teslamotors. And then a month or so ago, just like that, the stream of new posts about yoke dried up... just as if someone started deleting them on spot.

The real fun will be when the bulk deliveries start and people with reservations will be cancelling them because of the yoke. Because not everyone wants to drive a batmobile.

A "rectangular wheel" has a safety edge case that circular wheels don't: if the rectangular wheel is lowered too close to the driver's thighs, the bottom corners of the rectangle will collide with the driver's thighs when rotating the rectangle all the way left or right, and the driver might not realize this until already under way. Such rectangular wheels are standard in Formula 1 cars[1] but an F1 cockpit is tailor-made for each driver such that the driver can't mis-adjust the wheel height.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=formula+1+steering+wheel&iax=image...

Also on Formula 1 and other race steering wheels, a 90 degree turn to one way is full lock, so as far as the wheels can turn. This is several circles of a normal wheel. That is to say, either the yoke needs to have more movement per degree, or it will lead to awkward hand over hand movements. Both are terribly unsafe.

More importantly, the F1 steering system is setup with variable steering ratios so that they never (at least in racing), have to release the wheel. Even the hairpin at Monaco takes only 1/2 a turn [1] of the steering wheel.

Having to turn a rectangular steering wheel more than half a turn in ordinary driving is a serious safety issue. Installing it on a car for a conceit of fashion is outrageous.

If Tesla wants to install such a wheel, they need to setup the steering so that the full lock-to-lock range is within 180° or 190° of wheel turn. This can be done with variable ratio steering, and could be very cool.

[1] about 38-44 seconds into this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8rS07ynQ0Q

F1 wheel also has no capacitive touch buttons because if the driver had to hunt for a button he would have already lost the race.

We humans have motor memory, why are we actively trying to not used it.

Who thinks that touch sensitive buttons make sense here for turn signals, wipers, etc???

I can’t believe any regulator allowed this kind of terrible design on the road

I don't understand why they would remove turn signal stalks, unless they can automatically predict in which way you want to indicate a turn before turning in 99% of the cases.

It's just so natural to move the stalk down/up depending on which way you want to turn, and I'm not really sure this can be achieved with the touch buttons.

> I don't understand why they would remove turn signal stalks

Money!

The horn is especially egregious, I think. having to scan for the little horn button in an emergency situation sounds awful

You actually don’t have to. If you cover all 4 buttons on the ride side of the steering wheel with your palm (same motion as a traditional horn) it will sound the horn despite the yoke having a dedicated physical horn button.

The indicator/turn signal touch sensitive buttons are stacked vertically - which means if you've turned the steering wheel, you need to invert your selection to tap left/right correctly!

Sounds like horrible UX design to me.

Eh, I have had this issue in racing VR games (with a racing wheel setup) with shifters on the wheel. I was constantly confusing which was which as the wheel was spun around. I think it's something you just get used to.

Stuff that moves with the wheel is horrible. I’m in a turn, and I need to adjust anything (in my car, that’s phone and paddle shifting) and I need to chase them around in weird places. “Getting used to things getting harder” is a step back, not a premium experience worth paying those bucks for.

BMW has a nice fix for this. Paddle on the rear always shifts up, then there’s a paddle you press with your thumb that downshifts. Same thing on both sides you can downshift while turning the wheel by using your thumb on the top “paddle” instead of remembering which is left and which is right.

The shift controls on my 7th gen Celica are similar, button either side on front of the steering wheel always shifts down, press with the thumb; button on the back of the wheel always shifts up, press with index finger. This car is 20 years old.

The Celica has the cruise control stalk turn with the wheel, which is okay. My VW T5 Transporter's cruise control stalk is stationary affixed to the steering column, and that's okay too.

I also had a Honda Jazz that had paddles like you described.

I haven't tried many newer vehicles, but I can't see how anything they offer is much of an improvement.

Touch with no feedback (assuming no ridges or surface coat on the icons) for controls such as turn signals and horn is pretty scary to me. Maybe one could get used to it, but I don't see why replace physical buttons and levers. It's worked forever, you don't have to "learn it" or else miss blaring in a potentially dangerous situation, maybe because you couldn't twist your finger with pinpoint accuracy and precision and the yoke was not level so very hard to visualize in your mind without looking. It's absolutely one of the things touch controls fail at and any progress and innovation won't change until at least shape-shifting surfaces become mainstream (if ever)

Who would think that a rectangle would be better then a circle for a steering wheel is a non-race car? You now have to look at the steering wheel to make sure that you are grabbing it in the correct position?

they haven’t actually innovated anything or made their cars cheaper in like 4 years (the model 3 is more expensive than it was then). people are realizing autopilot is fake

so all they have now is their wacky steering wheel to get attention

Well, if Elon thinks it’s cool, doesn’t matter. Now we’ll see how many ordinary-but-very-well-off humans agree with him.

I'm surprised a car with a yoke is street-legal.

"___ is so essential, ubiquitous, and universally understood, that to change it for the sake of changing it seems both foolish and foolhardy."

This quote is Elon Musk in a nutshell.

Elon was waiting for this.

I accidentally clicked 'consumer reports' while trying to get to the article and saw the recent submissions from them were all anti-tesla articles. Perhaps we need to consider whether these companies have a strong incentive to write anti-tesla articles because tesla doesn't advertise (IE they can't make money from tesla) whereas other car manufacturers spend a ton of money on Ads.

From what I've seen on youtube people who actually have the new model s seem to like the yolk quite a bit. If it was an option on the model 3 when i bought it I would have definitely considered it. Getting the top of the wheel out of my view would be nice. I'm less sure about the turn signals - but I wouldn't miss the gear lever.

Consumer Reports is funded by their subscribers, not advertisers. They don't even accept free samples.

The Tesla yoke is a dangerous and unintuitive design that becomes readily apparent when put under any sort of objective test. It deserves all the negative press it gets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com