Every era of cars has its own idiosyncratic trends. In the 1950s, the style was 500 pounds of bolted-on chrome. In the 1970s, it was fifty linear yards of “simulated woodgrain” on the interior of every car and an ashtray in every door. In the 2000s, grilles and headlights looked like angry faces, while every other edge on the car got aggressively rounded off. (For a while, no car enthusiast’s magazine was complete without a “hot take” about how cars these days look like used bars of soap.) Today, automakers are slowly but inevitably embracing the steering yoke.
What Is A Yoke Steering?
A steering yoke is, quite simply, a steering wheel without the top section of the rim. In a further attempt to differentiate the “modern” yoke from the “old-fashioned” round steering wheel, most automakers straighten the yoke’s sides, essentially turning it into a rectangle or trapezoid with the horn in the center of the top edge. Sometimes, the bottom of the yoke's rim is also removed, leaving two handles on either side of the horn. Yokes make a car’s interior look incredibly futuristic with no further changes to the dashboard. Depending on one’s opinion, a yoke makes a car look like the 22nd century has arrived early, or like something out of science fiction, or like a video game racing simulator.
From the driver’s perspective, the yoke may be the biggest change in cars since the clutch pedal disappeared from the footwell. Yes, transmissions gained overdrive, recirculating-ball steering gave way to rack-and-pinion, and pushrod engines are ceding to overhead cams (with notable exceptions such as the LS engine so beloved of anyone who has ever done an engine swap). However, none of those changes affected what drivers saw on the dashboard after buckling in. You can forget about the overhead camshaft while driving, but you can’t ignore a yoke.
Which Cars Have Yokes?
The first widely-available car to use a yoke is the Tesla Model S Plaid. While automotive aficionados may bitterly quibble over whether it was revolutionary to remove the top of the steering wheel, the yoke was a sound publicity move for Tesla. Change in cars always comes with a great kerfuffle of fiery opinions. Predictably, the world of car journalism was flooded with angry screeds about how terrible yokes are and angsty articles about whether yokes are a safety hazard. Elon Musk could not have possibly bought that kind of media attention, even before he spent $43 billion on Twitter.
Now that the angriest yoke opinions are sputtering out, other automakers are cautiously tiptoeing behind Tesla with yokes of their own. Toyota has put a yoke in the Lexus RZ electric SUV. Kia’s EV9 concept SUV had a yoke, though the first photos of the production model show a round wheel on the dashboard. BMW has patented a yoke-like steering controller that has hinged handles protruding on either side of the hub. So far, this has only been seen in renderings and patent drawings. BMW has also presented an adjustable steering wheel that the driver can turn into a yoke by making the top segment of the rim go away.
Yokes Could Be The Steering Wheels of the Future
Whether the public embraces yokes after the novelty wears off remains to be seen. However, only a dedicated few are still bothering to be offended by yokes. The general shift from outrage to apathy makes yokes an easier sell. Yokes may quietly fade back out of existence after a few years, going down in history as a silly trend of the 2020s. If so, yokes would eventually seem as charmingly outdated like motorized automatic seatbelts and bustle-backs. Alternatively, “Do you drive a yoke or a wheel?” could become today’s equivalent to “Do you drive gasoline or diesel?”
But it's more likely that yokes become one of many steering options. We have seen something similar happen with automatic transmission shifters. While the only two options for many decades was a stick in the center console or a stick on the steering column, automakers have come up with a dizzying array of levers, dials, and knobs to get the car from park into drive. Similarly, yokes may be the first of many non-wheel steering controls. While someone getting into a new car today routinely asks how to turn on the headlights and windshield wipers, future drivers may have to ask “How do you steer it?” With BMW’s drive-by-handle steering controller ready to join the yoke in steering options that aren’t wheels, it seems likely that other automakers will try to come up with their own distinctive steering controls.
Yokes Aren't Innovative Or Ridiculous, But They Are Trendy (For Now)
As a publicity move, yokes are a brilliant design choice. As the bitter screeching among the commenterati has died off (all the anti-yoke arguments got repetitive after a year or two), the yoke has gained a reputation as something new, fresh, and different. Like adding a touchscreen in the early 2000s, a yoke is easy shorthand for modernity. In an earlier decade, marketing departments would have called yokes a “paradigm shift.” Today, the same people lovingly call them “disruptive.”
Replacing a steering wheel with a yoke has the same effect in cars as sanding off the popcorn ceiling has in home décor. It doesn’t change as much as proponents claim, but it happens to be on-trend at the moment.
Ultimately, yokes aren’t the “disruptive game-changer” some people really want them to be. A yoke is a great way to get people talking about a car, but they’re not a radical change. A yoke is an abridged steering wheel, and that’s it. You hold it a little differently while driving, and it's a bit awkward at first. Regardless of whether yokes go out of style or remain as an option in car brochures, people will eventually look back at the furious yoke debates and wonder why it was such a big deal.