I’m Slightly High On Post-Surgery Drugs And I Want To Make A Yoke Steering Wheel For My Car, Should I Do It?

Back in 2021, Tesla introduced a yoke steering not-wheel as standard equipment for its S and X cars, instantly generating scorn from enthusiasts and journalists worldwide. The company has since made the yoke an option rather than standard equipment and the world has moved on. I have not. I fell in love with that stupid yoke, and it has lived rent-free in my head ever since. Now, with the power of legal hard medications, ten fewer teeth than I had before, and a grinder, I’m going to give my favorite car a yoke. Please talk me out of the clouds.

Surgeries suck. If you’ve never gotten one before, consider yourself lucky. I just had my first-ever surgery and while it was minor, recovery has sucked harder than a Detroit 6V92 gulps air at its rev limit. If you’ve ever seen pictures of me online or met me in person, you know that I never show my teeth. I’ve made so much progress in my life, but my teeth have always been not-so-pearly white anchors that dragged me down.

I’m beginning a long five- to six-month process where my mouth heals up and strengthens so I can get dental implants. I desperately need something to distract me. This is the perfect time to do some of the projects that have been rattling around my head! A couple of them will involve my personal Autopian Test Car: A 2008 Smart Fortwo.

I have a defect where approximately 10 of my 28 adult teeth never grew in. Eight of those 10 spots were filled with baby teeth that, incredibly, have survived over three decades. By adulthood, I had horribly worn teeth on my lower jaw and a gap on my upper jaw that got bigger every year thanks to the missing teeth. It was a mess, so for these 32 years of my life I just never smiled with an open mouth.

My wife and I have finally come into a pile of cash and we were hoping to buy a gearhead heaven property with it. However, my dentist recently told me that time was up. Either I had to start my tooth implant journey now or those dying baby teeth were going to cause some big problems. When all is said and done I will spend at least $35,000 on fixing my mug, more than I’ve spent on my most expensive car by more than a factor of two. It’s honestly hard to think of all of the other things I could buy with this money, but my choices are to get implants or live with the partial dentures that don’t even fit in my mouth right now.

The first step of the process happened at the end of last week. My dentist pulled the bad teeth, added in bone grafts, and sewed me all up. I’ve been depressed about this surgery for over a month and I’ve lost countless nights of sleep. I feel like Frankenstein’s monster and I sound like Sean Connery. I’m also stuck on a soft food diet, can’t chew anything, and am generally just in a trough.

My pain has been remarkably low thanks to an armada of drugs prescribed by the dentist. I have an opioid, a steroid, some fancy mouth rinse, and an antibiotic. That goes on top of my normal hormone replacement therapy, Ozempic, and blood pressure meds. Finally, I have a barbiturate for if the opioid doesn’t work. In other words, I’m a gosh-darned walking pharmacy right now and my head may or may not be in a cloud. Since the operation, I’ve been busy doing little, non-stressful things, like trying to turn a Hot Wheels car into a tiny radio-controlled car!

I fixed my old Xbox 360, modified an old Android phone, cleaned parts of the Plymouth project, found the parts to fix the loud Smart, and ordered the parts to fix the coolant-free BMW. Then, I started cooking up bold ideas, including spending what will be about $180 in total to turn some $2 Hot Wheels cars into some tiny drift cars. Look, don’t ask why I have three Emiras. That’s one I’m looking forward to, but it’s taking forever to get the parts in.

Another one takes me back to that Tesla yoke. Yes, that same yoke that everyone joked about. Yes, that same yoke that was so unpopular even Tesla reduced it to just an option. I’ve always loved the stupid thing and wanted my own version of it.

I’ve long been enamored with the idea of putting airplane-inspired parts in cars. I love flying and I love driving, so what if I could combine aspects of both? During the early days of the pandemic, I turned a flight stick into a gear knob.

Take a look! It was just a cheap flight stick screwed on top of the foam of a Mercedes W123 shift knob.

I want to do that again, but now, perhaps with the power of prescription medications, I also want to put a yoke in my 2008 Smart Fortwo test car.

I’ve had this idea rattling around my head for over a decade but I’ve just never moved forward on it. My original idea was to put a real airplane yoke in my Smart. I never really knew what kind of yoke to put into my car. Maybe I’d get one meant for a Cessna 172 or an Ercoupe.

However, this presents some issues. Not only would I have to install the correct steering gear thread into the yoke, but the Smart’s wheel has an airbag and a steering angle sensor. The car will drive fine without these things, but an airbag fault and a traction control fault will be permanent. I hate unnecessary warning lights, so that would have sent me down a rabbit hole of manually disabling that airbag with my Mercedes programmer tool and transferring over the steering angle sensor. But then I’d be left without an airbag in a crash and, look, I already have enough teeth problems.

This is also just a ton of work for a modification that I might not even like in the first place. This weekend, I had a bit of a eureka moment. What if I just replicated a yoke using an existing Smart steering wheel?

This is something I considered in the past, but every time I looked at my Smart’s steering wheel I saw it as a bad candidate for a yoke.

I’d want the yoke to have a flat bottom like an aircraft yoke or maybe an open bottom like a racing wheel. What I hadn’t considered was looking at the simple two-spoke steering wheel found in base model Smart Fortwos.

This wheel can be cut at the top and at the bottom. It’ll also be plug-and-play so I don’t have to screw around with any electronics. Oh no.

Amusingly enough, you can buy aftermarket Smart Fortwo wheels with cutouts in them already, but these wheels cost about $1,000 or more. I’m not putting a $1,000 wheel into a car I paid $1,400 for.

My drug-filled mind already purchased a Smart Fortwo Pure steering wheel, so it’s already on its way to my apartment. I already have a cutting wheel, so I’ll just need something to clean up the leather I slice through. The medications will be all gone by time it arrives. But you know what? Screw it, let’s do it, anyway. In a worst-case scenario, Smart steering wheels take all of five minutes to replace and I can put the old one back on. Here’s a bad render of my idea:

When the wheel arrives, I’ll first cut it at the top where the upper leather wrap stitches into the leather wrapped around the side of the wheel.

Removing a Smart’s steering wheel is as easy as loosening a single T40 bolt, pulling the wheel out, and then unclipping some connectors. Then I just slam the replacement wheel on.

If I’m feeling particularly silly and like the results of the first drive, I’ll then cut out the bottom of the replacement wheel and see what happens.

To be clear, this is quite possibly the second dumbest thing I’ve done with a car. Smarts aren’t racecars or planes, where you can get away with a yoke because you don’t have to do a full 360-degree spin to reach full deflection. Instead, this is a cheap city car. It takes more than a full turn to go from lock to lock. A do-it-yourself yoke is arguably unsafe and definitely stupid. There’s a reason the vast majority of car steering wheels aren’t yokes. I’ll realize that the second I try to grab a piece of wheel that doesn’t exist anymore. Here’s the Superleggera version!

So, don’t worry, I won’t take this on a highway or anything. I sort of just want to do it and play around with it to see if my decade-long idea is as bad as it sounds. Oh, and in case you were wondering, I consider my worst-ever automotive choice to be buying multiples of the same Volkswagens with the naive expectation that maybe the latest one won’t break on me. It shouldn’t have taken me four B5.5 Passats for me to figure it out.

At any rate, now you know one of my deepest, darkest automotive secrets. I think the Tesla yoke looks so cool that I want to make a dollar-store version of it. Please talk me out of this. Or do talk me into it. This idea is easily reversible, after all.

Topshot image: Daimler AG