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
Wish you a smooth recovery Mercedes! Don’t make any irreversible choices while on any meds that make you kooky tho! Or have your wife do a two factor approval 🙂
With that said, I will say no on the yoke unless the smart has variable steering.
Congratulations on the teeth repairs – I am sure you will be very happy on the other end.
Not sure why dentistry has become so expensive, although I did find a new younger dentist who has an office full of modern equipment who is much less expensive than my old dentist who retired. So much less, I almost asked if they could add something to my bill last time because it was so low – $125 for a cleaning with bitewings and a panoramic x-ray. Then I had to go to the holistic dentist to have my mercury fillings removed and they got me good – could have bought a few cars like in Mercedes stable for what I paid. That said the detox seems to be working – from a high starting point of 17X the recommended max mercury level – my shaking is way down, but still has a ways to go. I am surprised it took my doctors a decade to find the mercury – I guess shaking is not a usual mercury poisoning symptom.
Get off the pharmaceuticals and get some edibles (including spiked drinks if you cannot chew gummies) if you still have too much pain. Cannabis is not habit forming.
Maybe you should have married a dentist. I did. My mouth didn’t have all the issues you’ve had, but she fixed a few broken teeth with a cool system that uses an intra-oral camera, a 3-D lathe, porcelain ingots, a tiny kiln and some very interesting software. And she did the same for my brother. It would have cost us each thousands. Perhaps into five figures. The “family discount” was nice.
Anyway, my sympathies for what will be a bit of a journey.
And my vote is to leave yokes in the airplanes.
Ughh – had most of my baby teeth pulled at 13, they didn’t fall out on their own. Then braces on the adult teeth once they came in. Then wisdom teeth out at 20. Take care of your choppers people.
Betteridge’s law is in effect, so, no.
I wish you wouldn’t do this, but I am sure it will make a fun read when you do!
I’ve had my share of oral surgeries too, up to and including dentures at 26, which haven’t fit in 7 years yet, eventually I’m hoping for an all on four implant solution or something. I wish you a speedy recovery, it’ll be worth it for sure.
On the steering wheel idea, why not? You could just swap it into place when you’re not using the car on the road, and it would drum up conversation at any event you take it to.
The yoke is a fun project that will get your mind off a painful procedure while you heal up, so go for it! Even if you don’t ever use it. Watch out for those heavy opioids—try to wean yourself off of them as fast as you can.
I’m surprised at the amount of people against the steering wheel idea.
I’m completely sober, so allow me to offer a few counterpoints:
1: It will be a novel thing that makes driving the Smart a bit more interesting.
2: It’ll be a conversation starter.
3: It’s not like it’s your only car.
4: Questionable modifications are the spice of life
5: You can’t learn always swap it back.
6: Everyone is against it, so that automatically makes me like it more. (This is more of my own character flaw than a reason, but still!)
7: Having an idea, executing the idea, and then discovering if you love it or hate it is an integral part of being a true car-nut!
So the responsible, experienced, and level headed commenters on your right shoulder say “Mercedes No.”
The hillbilly armed with a sawzall and a fresh battery on your left says “MERCEDES YES”
I think this may fall into the category of “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”. Unfortunately, there are situations in driving where you need to make quick decisions/moves for accident avoidance. Yokes in aircraft are fine because you don’t need to make huge inputs – that’s not the case in a car. This modification will remove more than half of the available surface your hands need to make these kind of inputs.
Now that I’m done tut-tutting this suggestion, I hope that your procedures are successful and you get the results that you’re after – I’m sure you will be happy with the results. Best wishes for healing now and the road ahead.
That’s some pretty brave sh*t to be having all that work done. As well as laying the story out there for your readers. Pain will subside; money will come again.
Re: steering wheels vs. yokes, I have had the experience of both emergency-level slamming an early Mustang lock-to-lock on a mountain highway (I don’t know how many turns but it was a bunch) and doing the same in a Cessna 172 when the pilot had handed me the controls for a minute over the Sierras and we hit heavy turbulence (about half-a-turn one-way-to-the-other). Steering wheels definitely belong on cars, and yokes on airplanes. However, I am a big believer in not taking people’s word for things and trying them yourself, all the experts around that don’t do so aren’t worth much. The clunk noise when something hits the bottom of the scrap barrel can be satisfying in its way.
First, heal up Mercedes. Having had several ortho surgeries and a gastro surgery just last month, the one bit of advice I can offer is if you have to take the opiods (I do everything can avoid them) take stool softener. If I don’t, I seize up like the engine on my 1987 S-10 Blazer. Weirdly, I also have one baby tooth that was never displaced by an adult tooth. Still goig strong in my sixties.
Second, I’d say a big no to the yoke. My friend has one in his Model S Plaid, and you lose so much. “You get used to it”, as he said to me, is not exactly a ringing endorsement for a design! Round- if it ain’t broke…
Feel better!
Best wishes for getting better. Be careful with all those meds. I had BP meds, allergy meds, and a ticker timer med before my surgery. Seemed like I was getting something every couple hours in the hospital, and none of it was BP meds because my BP was too low thanks to all those pain meds, roids and meds they used to knock me out twice.
Fast forward a bit over 3 weeks after coming home (4 weeks to the day from my first surgery). My meds list are BP meds, allergy med, ticker timer med, and a nerve pain med that I was told to be on until the doctor sees me again. No pain pills now (for 2 days straight). I don’t have addiction problems, nor does my wife, but we both have close family members that do and do not want to even think about getting into that trouble. We would rather deal with some pain than risk it.
My wife is a LOT tougher than me by the way. She had breast surgery a couple months ago and was off pain meds in 5 days. She started skipping them on day 2 and stopped taking them even at night on day 4. She has more family members than me and has a LOT more side effects from the meds.
Anyway, hope you get better and well enough to think yokes are stupid again.
Ditto on the meds. Six ortho surgeries and a very painful gastro surgery just last month. In each case, I got off the opiod pain meds on day two. No addiction issues either but, dang, that stuff binds me up as if I poured cement down my throat.
Congrats on making the choice to jump in and get your teeth sorted, despite the considerable expense. That’s the sort of life upgrade that will pay off, more than any passing Passat that takes your fancy.
Chopping up a steering wheel? You’ve got to be yoking me.
Can’t wait to see that first giant smile, girl. The advantage of implants is having movie star teeth without the required 3 decades of dental care.
As for the yoke-wheel, just say no.
“I’m Slightly High On Post-Surgery Drugs And I Want To Make A Yoke Steering Wheel For My Car, Should I Do It?”
No… I think you should convert it to a tiller…
https://historygarage.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/1905-oldsmobile-tiller.jpg
A yoke wouldn’t work for me since I cruise with my right hand at 12 o’clock and my left hand at 9 (with my left elbow on the arm rest or window sill. Also, it’s 2.5 turns lock-to-lock. But do whatever works for you.
Your first mock-up looks so danged happy.
Shout out to the retained baby tooth crowd. My first lower molar on one side is a baby tooth. Doesn’t really look any different until you see the x-ray and then it’s tiny. Never caused any issues and it’s healthy. My dentist said “don’t worry about it. It may degrade over time and require replacement but for now it’s healthy”. My dad had the same thing but his was pulled before his adult teeth came in so they would fill the gap. Different times and all. I wonder if either of my sons will have the same thing.
And congratulations on having your teeth fixed. The pain sucks but the reward should be worth it. Once I was at the dentist and a lady was crying with joy after having some front teeth replaced and being happy with her smile. As someone with ok teeth I didn’t fully realize the impact they can have until then.
Please don’t take it around a neighborhood, either. The moment you find out that the yoke is not suitable for operation in non-thinking automatic brain mode is the same moment when it was necessary to react automatically and have your equipment do your will reliably. And the effects could range from bent rims and scraped bumpers to loss of life, human or animal.
If you want to mock it up, wrap the top and bottom parts of the wheel that would be cut away with two spiky punk dog collars. Then try driving without ever touching them. And notice how much attention is taken away from your driving at the exact times when it needs to be there — when the wheel isn’t straight.
It sounds like you are fully committed to this modification, so go for it and let us know how bad it goes.
Teeth are so very important, so I am happy that you are getting it done. I suspect it will be worth it when you buy a car you’ve always wanted, and you feel confident enough to break ito a big grin. Congrats on starting the process, and enjoy all the soup!
I flew face first into an old GM van with the the world’s biggest heavily chromed bumper after a car t boned me on my bike. Did bone grafts and implants next. Hang in there, get through the next few months and I think you will be pleased. Also remember that I’m a federally authorized narcotics disposal agent at your service. Oh yeah no yoke for me and my Corvette is in my mouth$$
Best wishes on your dental journey, Mercedes. Glad you’re able to take a step that will help you stay healthier.
As for the yoke … nothing matters any more, so why not?
That sucks about the cost of surgery but definitely feel it’s the better(not funner) decision, the coolest car cave in the world will mean nothing if you’re in agonizing pain, or worse get a bad infection, and can’t enjoy it.
I wouldn’t recommend going full send on a yoke, maybe a squarish one like the BMW Z22 concept? Still have something to grip when going lock to lock but gives that yoke feeling when driving down the straights.