We love EV innovation, but spare me the awful yokes | Opinion
Steering wheels, as the name suggests, are round.
Have been for roughly 130 years, and precisely nobody said they wanted any different for road cars.
Yet here I am, in Lexus’s revised RZ EV, with hands on yoke. The dictionary definition is an “open topped steering control,” typically found in F1 cars, aeroplanes or racing sims.
Donning my luddite hat, that’s exactly where they belong. Not on the family luxury large SUV.
Why? Because they’re not as good as steering wheels. Simples.
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Of late, the automotive industry seems intent on answering questions nobody asked, like forcing upon us climate control via touchscreens.
Doing away with those “messy” switches, knobs and buttons may please a minimalism-obsessed cabin designer, but the sane world knows prodding a monitor to change fan speed is an infuriating regressive step.
A digital button saying “Climate Menu” has me doing a little sick in my mouth.
Back to the Lexus yoke. It’s been made possible by the RZ’s range topping $105,000 550e F Sport featuring steer-by-wire technology.
Again, not many car buyers were clamouring for doing away with a proper mechanical linkage between steering control and front wheels.
Steering columns rather than electrical signals controlling direction of travel feels like a reassuringly good thing.
(Lexus assures the system’s engineered with “triple redundancies” by the way).
My initial yoke impressions are good. There’s a Star Wars feel to the odd-shaped controller; it forces hands to the correct 9 and 3 o’clock positions, and no steering wheel top means a perfectly unobscured digital instrument cluster.
The turning angle – due to the programmable electronics stuff – is limited to plus or minus 200-degrees. So when three-point turning, there’s no need to do the steering-wheel-shuffle: hands can stay on the wheel – sorry, yoke – for the entire manoeuvre.
But if you’ve had decades of palming the top of a steering wheel (as any parking legend should), old habits die hard.
Forget you’re with yoke (you will) and you end up grasping thin air, smartly followed by punching yourself in the leg.
It’s altogether comical. Then gets annoying.
But this isn’t a Lexus pile-on. In fact, I bloody love how the luxo brand is first in Australia to offer the steer-by-wire/yoke combo: properly new things in our game are rare indeed.
Infiniti had steer-by-wire in its Q50 a decade back (it was altogether terrible), but no yoke.
While Tesla has, of course, featured yokes in some of its models overseas, but never for us.
What’s a yoke steer like then?
I only had half a day with the yoked Lex, which was nowhere near enough time to reprogram a brain that’s known only circular steering controls in cars for 30+ years of driving.
At slow speeds it’s indeed easy; plus feels tight and responsive. But a bit video game-like responsive … unnatural and very electricky. Which, of course, it is.
It’s more successful when you seek out a fun stretch of higher speed corners. The RZ 550e features another Lexus debut called Interactive Manual Drive, bringing Hyundai Ioniq 5N-like simulated paddle shifts.
The paddled yoke, plus the electric brain dialling up steering weight and feel, now makes far more sense. Rapid response with the slight push-pull of the hands, and you can play at being Verstappen or Top Gun Maverick for a while.
Fun as this is, it all feels wholly incongruous. I’m in a leather-lined Lexus large SUV, not a GT3 race car.
To that end, it feels this yoke and steer-by-wire would be far better suited to a performance car and track shenanigans, rather than a heavy SUV destined for private school drop offs.
So I’ll opt for my pipe and slippers for now, thanks. Give me the ol’ circular steerer in my car, which thankfully Lexus does in its lesser RZ grades.
Alas, if you want the revolutionary 550e F Sport, you’re stuck with the yoke. There’s no way of de-optioning it. But if you embrace fun-to-show-off innovations, doubtless you’ll love this funny little rectangular steerer.
Just make peace with a few self-inflicted leg punches while your muscle memory plays catch-up.
