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Comment by georgewfraser | Hacker News Reader

I have an S with a yoke and prefer it to a round steering wheel. 95% of the time it’s better: you can see the entire dashboard and your body can feel the angle of the wheel instinctively. 5% of the time it’s worse, during low speed maneuvers.

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It's a very natural thing to unwind a wheel with a dragged hand when entering traffic from a stop on a perpendicular side street. And I'd argue that's far more than 5% of the substantial steering a driver does.

They could have just flattened the circle on the top like a D wheel to give some clearance on the instrumentation. Interrupting the continuous shape with a yoke is the problem, not that it isn't a circle.

It's as if the decision makers behind the yoke don't drive themselves, or were actively trying to make the driving experience worse to compel FSD adoption

Depends on where you drive. I live in SE PA. Roads here tend to be winding, even in the suburbs. Like "slow down to 20 mph so you don't slide off the road" winding. Never mind going into Philly with its weird intersections and tight turns.

Maybe 5% of your driving it's worse, it would be more like 70% of mine. I don't need to see the entire dashboard, I can get all the info I need just fine through the wheel, which adjusts. Also, cars with HUDs are a thing if you go for top level trims.

But when muscle memory matters, I want a wheel to grab. One double-take because the yoke isn't where my instincts expect could be one too many, it's like taking the shoulder-harness off your seat belt so that you look better while driving. Just serves no good purpose beyond vanity.

You should be able to see the entire dash board with any steering wheel

It really depends on your height and preferred wheel height setting. I'm tall and in some cars the wheel obscures a good portion of the insturments.

There are significant and effective federal regulations around this. If you are telling the truth, your steering wheel is way too high, and you need to lower it

Not who you are responding to, but I have a tall sitting height and I suspect that the steering wheel is too low. Consider this diagram of a properly adjusted steering wheel (instrumentation is where the "II" is):

     /----\
    /  II  \
    |------|
    \      /
     \----/

If you are tall what can happen is:

     /-II-\
    /      \
    |------|
    \      /
     \----/

A telescoping steering wheel helps quite a bit because you can adjust your seat back/forth more to get a good angle, but in cars without telescoping steering wheels, I have the second sight-picture at any position in which it is comfortable to hold the steering wheel.

If you are suggesting:

       II
     /----\
    /      \
    |------|
    \      /
     \----/

then this will render the airbags ineffective.

Exactly. This happens to me because I'm tall. If I adjust the wheel to not obscure the cluster, then it's no longer comfortable for my back/shoulders.

My single favorite feature of the 3/Y is that there is no instrument cluster.

Some cars like a prius just center the cluster

There are better solutions than chopping off half the wheel though. For example, Volkswagen ditched the binnacle and put the gauge cluster screen on the steering column instead of on the dashboard. This is so that it can move up and down with the steering wheel to whatever height it's set at. Unfortunately VW also used capacitive buttons, but apparently they will go back to real buttons in the future.

You know what's even better? A proper HUD.

> low speed maneuvers

AKA maneuvers. Driving on the highway in a straight line is not a maneuver.

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