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

Once we’ve driven our brand-new Model S a few more miles, we’ll publish a fuller First Drive review that will go into detail about all the changes to the updated car. And after we’ve completed months of in-depth testing—the same tests that Consumer Reports conducts on every car we anonymously purchase and evaluate—we’ll publish our full review of the vehicle with test results. But the yoke is such a jarring departure from the norm that we felt it deserved its own evaluation. Tweets about the yoke get thousands of likes. Friends and family ask us, “Have you tried the yoke?”

So we devoted this entire article to the yoke. Over the course of a full week, 10 of our test drivers chronicled every time it slipped out of their hands during a turn, every ache and pain from gripping the handles during a highway cruise, every time a tester’s hands didn’t fit on the yoke’s grips, every time we accidentally honked the horn while trying to make a turn, and every time we had to look down to see which turn signal was which—so you can decide whether it’s a deal-breaker for what appears to be an otherwise excellent EV. We haven’t studied all steering wheels this closely, so we don’t have official comparative data. But we know cars, and we know steering wheels.