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Illustration for article titled Mercedes Is Still Playing Coy About Its Formula E Future — Photo: Hector Vivas (Getty Images)

About a month ago, the Mercedes-EQ Formula E team announced it’d signed an option with the series to begin development of its Gen 3 car. “Development,” in this sense, is pretty much tantamount to attending meetings alongside all the other constructors — but don’t mistake it as a confirmation of ongoing participation. The Gen 3 regulations are expected to kick in after the next season, beginning with the 2022-23 championship, and last until the end of the 2025-26 campaign.

On Tuesday, team boss Ian James related in a virtual roundtable discussion, of which Jalopnik was a part, that Mercedes still isn’t quite ready to officially commit to the Gen 3 cycle. However, James also said that formalization will come “in due course.”

We need to take decision obviously at some point because of the development work that’s going on, and at the moment we’ve registered as an interested manufacturer. Therefore we’re able to take part in the technical working groups and so on and so forth.

So I don’t think it’s going to drag on for too much longer, but this just like the natural part of the process — just making sure that, you know, we understand the direction the things are going in and that it’s right. Mercedes has a lot of things going on internally — as there is across the whole automotive industry at the moment — and so there’s sort of external factors to us as a team, which needs to be taken into consideration, and that will all be done in due course.

What’s interesting about Mercedes dragging its feet with respect to a full endorsement is that many of its major automaker-aligned rivals have not. At the end of March a group of constructors, including Porsche, Nissan, Mahindra and DS, made their continued involvement known. There was said to be a deadline at this time for teams to make that call, as The Race reported, but Mercedes evidently decided to take its sweet time and not worry too much if anyone noticed.

If the tentative Gen 3 specifications bear out as planned, Formula E cars should receive quite the power bump — rising from the current qualifying spec of 250 kW (335 horsepower) to 350 kW (469 HP), and 300 kW for races. Energy recovery, or regen, will be harvested from both axles. The addition of mid-race “flash-charging” will necessitate pit stops for refueling, adding a degree of strategy and unpredictability while potentially extending race length, too. Perhaps Formula E will even be able to entertain more full-scale circuits as it’s attempted to this year, considering the cars will be more powerful and possibly be able to run for longer.

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But Formula E is in no position to twist Mercedes’ arm. It’s already losing Audi and BMW after this season, as the Silver Arrows’ top two domestic rivals have set their sights on sports car racing, specifically with LMDh prototype programs. LMDh is not a pure-electric series — though it does involve a spec hybrid component — so there is some alternative energy marketability there.

So the ball is really in Mercedes’ court at this point. That said, given the language James and the team’s technical advisor/development driver, Gary Paffett, were using on the call, it doesn’t seem like the company is feigning interest in Formula E just to dip out without a moment’s notice. I asked Paffett — who wears multiple hats within the team — to sum up his feelings on what Gen 3 will bring to the series. It seems he’ll relish the opportunity to get behind the wheel:

The circuits we race at, they’re very tight. Already with the car we have now, the Gen 2 car, the 250 kW in qualifying — you’re arriving at some corners thinking, you know, you could be in an F1 car in Mexico doing 320 [km/h]. They are damn quick. So the prospect of the speed we’re going to have in Gen 3 cars is going to be incredible. It’s going to be an incredible car to drive. And … the harvesting from both axles adds a completely new dimension.

James and Mercedes in general have been nonspecific in explaining why the team hasn’t yet planted its flag for Formula E’s next era, but it’s fair to assume money probably has something to do with it.

It’s understandable that Mercedes would want to be absolutely sure it’s making the proper investment. Part of Gen 3’s addendums states that any team that exits the series midway through a regulatory cycle, as Audi and BMW are about to, must pay Formula E the lump sum of all the regulatory fees it would have incurred on a yearly basis if it’d just kept competing until the end of the cycle.

Those fees amount to $415,000 per year — quite a lot to pony up at once just to not race, though only a small portion of the roughly $12 million Jaguar is said to have spent in 2019. (A prospective cost cap figures to bring that down by as much as two thirds.) Formula E is hoping constructors see that bill and decide they might as well stick around. And even if they don’t, the organizers can still make some scratch as teams walk out the door.

Illustration for article titled Real-World Video Of The Tesla Yoke Steering Wheel Is As Bad As You Think — Screenshot: Tesla

We’ve discussed the refreshed and technically impressive 2022 Tesla Model S before, and especially some of the UX decisions made, including the inclusion of the cut-down, yoke–style steering wheel that now comes standard on the Model S. While we’ve had a grand time speculating about how shitty using such a steering not-wheel might be, we haven’t really had any direct, empirical evidence. Until now. Yes, someone has driven a brand-new Model S with the yoke, and, yeah, it looks like it kinda sucks.

After last week’s post about Elon Musk equating of human input and error, you’d think I’d have had enough of dead-eyed Muskovites berating me on social media and via-email, but it’s become so common now that I think my body is starting to crave it, like a drug.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at this little neighborhood drive with the yoke:

…and, a part two! This time with verbal commentary:

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He does say that it’s getting easier, and he has to think about it less, especially when you stop using “round wheel steering techniques,” or, as many of us like to call it, “all of your previous driving experience.”

At best, I’d say this looks awkward. The elimination of control stalks in favor of those little buttons for turn signals I just can’t see as an improvement, especially because the orientation and location (though I guess your thumb is always near them, or should be, but the whole side that thumb is on can change) of the signal buttons changes as you move the wheel, something that just isn’t a problem with a column-mounted indicator.

Why is this a good idea, again? Because stalks are bad?

Incidental controls aside, it’s the main function of this thing — steering, arguably a big part of driving a car — that seems difficult.

I know there’s an argument that F1 cars use yoke-type wheels, but, remember, F1 cars are set up so that lock-to-lock turning can happen without the hands crossing. F1 cars themselves don’t move the front wheels more than 14 or 20 degrees even on the tightest tracks. F1 designers also don’t want drivers putting hand-over-hand like they’re parallel parking, so F1 cars make do with steering wheels that don’t even do one full turn from lock-to-lock. Again, even on the tightest tracks, they only move between 300 and 400 degrees at most.

The Model S wheel turns about two and a quarter full rotations, or around 800 degrees lock-to-lock according to one owner, which is pretty close to the standard 900 degrees/2.5 turns for most cars, as Jalopnik’s own automotive engineer David Tracy tells me. That is not what a yoke is designed to do.

The only car I’ve driven with a yoke was this:

…which you might recognize as being from a dragster, a car specifically designed to just go straight as much as possible. A yoke is a wheel design that’s shaped that way to discourage a lot of turning, which is why for cars that may need to do a lot of low-speed maneuvering and turning, like a normal street car, a yoke is a pretty crappy design.

I’m sure it’s something a driver could eventually get used to, but that’s very much not the same thing as a new design that actually makes the operation of the machine better.

Here’s a dramatic example of why yoke-type wheels aren’t great for a lot of turning, as demonstrated by installing a yoke in a drift car. If you click the link you can watch and see why it’s not ideal, particularly for the structural integrity of your thumbs.

The yoke design also forces crossed arms a lot, which would be bad if the airbag deployed, and while that’s possible to happen with any wheel, the design of the yoke exacerbates it. The yoke precludes letting a wheel slide back into position and forces your hands to be locked onto the 9 and 3 positions. (I know a lot of track driving demands this, but there aren’t airbags there in track cars and, come on, the Model S is a street car.)

It’d be one thing if this was just an option you could decide to get or not, and I thought that might be the case, but if there’s a place on the Tesla build-and-order-your-Model S section of the website that lets you pick your wheel, I haven’t been able to find it.

Most of the tweets commenting on the video aren’t particularly positive, save for the sprinkling of Tesla apologists and evangelists, but I’d encourage you to watch it and come to your own decisions.

Ideally, you should be able to test it out yourself to see, but in the interim, I guess you could hacksaw off the upper half of your steering wheel and decide if this path is for you.

Oh, and my editor-in-chief (I want to say Ronnie somebody?) all but demanded I make you aware of his yoke bon mot, so here you go:

I’m all for innovation and novel approaches to things we take for granted; often, great new solutions can be found that way. The yoke, though, is different. It’s not really new, as cars with yokes (even sentient cars) have been around for decades. If drivers really wanted a yoke, they could have had a yoke, long ago.

The point is, nobody wanted one. Because for most normal driving, they suck. That seems to be the part Tesla forgot.