This Argument Against Turn Signal Stalks In Favor Of Tesla’s Little Steering Wheel Buttons Is So Bad I Need To Discuss It

Stalkbuttons Top
ADVERTISEMENT

It’s no secret that I’ve not been a fan of yoke-type steering wheels. Sure, they look kind of cool, but they don’t really offer any actual improvement in the way a car is controlled, even in situations where steering ratios are altered or other compensations made. It’s just not making things better. The same goes for Tesla’s implementation of turn indicator controls on the yoke, which they accomplish with a pair of buttons, one atop the other. This approach got an unusual amount of attention recently, as a Tesla owner and fan posted a video on Twitter that suggested the buttons were superior to stalks, and the post got over 16 million views and over 4,000 replies. Clearly, people have thoughts about how they indicate their turns, and, unsurprisingly, so do I. The indication of turns is what separates us from the baser animals, and the methods by which we accomplish this matter. So let’s dig in a bit.

First, if you haven’t seen the post and video, here you go:

Not much to it, is there? And yet, in these meager six seconds of video, a lot is revealed and, perhaps more importantly, a lot is not. First, the miming of how a hand would activate the turn signal stalk here is wildly exaggerated. Nobody moves their hand like that to flick the turn signal stalk. That’s more like the motion you’d make to shift the three-speed manual transmission lever on a Studebaker, if it was on the other side. You don’t need to put your whole arm into the act of flicking the signal lever; it can be done by extending your fingers as you’re turning the wheel, and the direction the wheel is turning is the direction the stalk needs to move. It’s almost like you just reach out as you’re already going by.

It becomes muscle memory, and effortless.

Maybe we need some diagrams. Here’s the basic situation, with both types of controls in place:

Diag1

Okay, so let’s look at what it takes to indicate a turn while making a right turn here, without the shitty overdone pantomime of the video:

Diag2

You can flick the stalk with your fingers as you turn past it clockwise, flicking the lever up; or, you use your thumb to push the “up” button on the wheel. I’d guess once you’re used to it, you wouldn’t really need to look at the wheel to do it, but there is more target accuracy required to hit the button – which is close to the button for the other direction below it – than there is required to flick the stalk, which pretty much just requires extending one or more of your fingers off the wheel and encountering the stalk as you rotate past. As anyone who has ever done this in a car can tell you, it’s tough to miss.

Now, here’s the other significant advantage of the stalk approach: a stalk never moves. Let’s look at where the indicator controls are if you’re already steering the wheel:

Diag3Sometimes, you will need to indicate a turn when your wheel is already turned. This can happen in a lot of different scenarios, like when you’re preparing to exit a driveway onto a road or you’re indicating readiness to turn into a parking spot, marking your intended plan, or you’re on a roundabout and need to signal when you’re exiting, or lots of other situations. It’s not that uncommon. And yet, in any case where the steering wheel isn’t dead straight ahead, those turn indicator buttons will be somewhere else. They can be anywhere on the circle of where that steering wheel can turn. They can be 45° above or below where you expect them or 120° away. Once they get to, say, 90°+, the orientation of the controls in relation to one another changes, too.

What was once a button atop another will become two side-by-side buttons. Where top button meant right and bottom means left reverses once the wheel passes that 90° mark. There’s no way that’s better. A stalk stays in the same place, requiring the same motion for left and right, which is how muscle memories are formed. When the wheel is turned, you’d have to give at least some kind of glance to know where the buttons are and how they’re oriented. Sure, if you keep your hands locked at 9 and 3 like they say you should when track driving, I guess that could be okay, but let’s be real: that’s not how people tend to drive.

Sometimes we just hold the wheel at the bottom, sometimes we rest a hand on top, and okay, if it’s a yoke, you can’t do that, and you mostly have to keep your hands at 9 and 3, but, well, that sucks.

I noticed that a lot of the replies imply that people don’t like the buttons simply because of tradition or habit or the unenviable state of being a boomer:

I also see replies analogizing this decision to other tech-based interface decisions:

These aren’t really germane, not just because we don’t have decades of muscle memories for smartphone controls like this, but also because we’re not controlling 4,000 pound machines going at high speeds with our phones. Well, most of us aren’t.

There are also many replies stating much of the same things I’m saying here, too. It’s remarkable how many people feel strongly about all of this, and, really, why shouldn’t they? Change can be important or scary or needed or difficult or frivolous, or maybe even all of that, but when a change seems to be happening for reasons that don’t actually improve things, I think people are pretty good at assessing that. If there’s some huge advantage here, usability-wise, I don’t see it. What a number of replies have been suggesting as a valid reason is cost:

…or just the idea that nothing can be better than something:

https://twitter.com/fabianrudengren/status/1662081355386068993?s=20

I am curious to hear what you, the Autopian Collective Mind, think of all this. Is there some advantage I’m not seeing? Am I just a pawn of Big Stalk? I’m willing to listen, especially to people who don’t flail their arms to turn on their blinkers.

Relatedbar

The 2023 Lexus RZ’s Steer-By-Wire Yoke Is Strange. But I Want More

It’s Time To Take A Fresh Look At The VW ID.4’s Most Controversial Feature: The Power Window Switches

Here’s What Happened When I Confronted Volvo’s Head Designer About The Company’s Egregious Decision To Require A Touchscreen Button To Open The EX90’s Glovebox

The Mazda CX-30 Is A Good Car With An Annoying User Interface That Convinced Me That All Infotainment Screens Should Be Touchscreens

Nobody Is Asking For Animated Digital Car Assistants So Someone Should Tell BMW And Mini That

182 thoughts on “This Argument Against Turn Signal Stalks In Favor Of Tesla’s Little Steering Wheel Buttons Is So Bad I Need To Discuss It

  1. I am proposing stalk when it comes to turning. . .but I am also a bit of a traditionalist. So I was always going to have a skewed opinion.

    That said, this fells like it was done for cost reasons only. Then they tried to convince you that it is better. That is marketing, not engineering.

  2. I’m at the point where anything Tesla can fuck all the way off. The way these weird nerds feel so fucking superior for sucking in Daddy Elon’s teat is truly disturbing. The worst is yet to come when the Cybertruck starts getting into customer hands.

  3. I prefer a stalk but the worst thing for me on the Tesla is that they are not physical buttons where you can feel the shape, there is no feedback on the Tesla you have to look if your finger is in the right place.
    You are right about the turn left=stalk down , turn right=stalk up that’s easier but me, I put the turn signal BEFORE I turn.

  4. I’m disturbed to learn that Torch doesn’t indicate that he’s about to turn until he’s already turning
    That said, yes, the stalk is obviously superior. It almost never requires removing your hand from the wheel (unless your left hand is in an unusual position), and it’s always in the same place – wherever the hell my hand is in space, it knows where that turn signal stalk is going to be, every single time.

  5. Citroën had around 20 years of all its cars having indicator stalks which did not self-cancel.
    Their spin was that having the stalks cancel themselves was dangerous because it could happen before the driver wanted it to…
    In spite of this quirk, there were not thousands of dead bodies in grave yards under stones reading — Here lies another victim of indicators that did not cancel. Blink in peace…
    People adapt quickly to what is before them, but I agree, for all sorts of reasons, having buttons on the steering wheel for blinkers is stupid. Especially a cheap click plastic one…

  6. I remember friends telling me the iPhone would never catch on because pressing buttons on the screen wouldn’t provide the physical click feedback .”

    My phone still has physical volume and power/lock buttons.

    The only reason it doesn’t have a physical keyboard is because it would take up space that could be put to better use when not typing.

    Do the turn signal buttons on the yoke turn into something else when you don’t need to signal?

    1. My first 2 smartphones had physical keyboards, and I wouldn’t buy anything else if they still made them. Typing on a touchscreen sucks.

  7. We don’t put buttons on things that rotate around a central axis for a reason. Just because a Logtiech G29 has buttons on the wheel to emulate an F1 car doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

    The argument against buttons is also (inversely?) why I don’t like paddle shifters. When you’re turning it’s difficult to change gears with paddle shifters because you’re attempting to hold your steering angle but also slide your hands around the wheel so your fingers can pull one of the paddles. You’re making one hand do three actions at once. It makes merging in traffic, moving through drive-throughs, and even driving mountain roads a pain in the ass because you have to either slow down and change gears before you start turning, or hope your fingers can reach far enough to do it during the turn.

    Also people using touchscreens as a pinnacle of interface engineering don’t understand that touchscreens were the cheapest compromise feasible between input area and device size for the original iPhone. Touchscreens caught on after the fad died because economies of scale made them cheaper than buttons, not because they’re better than buttons.

  8. It’s a lot easier to push a wrong button than it is to move a stalk in the wrong direction. I like your point about the stalk always being there while buttons are a rotating target. And in the words of Buford T. Justice, “The got-danged Germans got nothin’ to do with it!”

Leave a Reply