I do find many of these comments interesting in that most of the things that are on the yolk as it exists are nothing new. I can remember several cars that I had having a small horn button on either side of the wheel at 3:00 and 9:00. I also have had cars with a rim blow horn where you actually squeezed the steering wheel. I had another with the horn that was actually actuated by the turn signal stalk by pushing it in.
Additionally all the crazy videos with people having their arms twisted up like pretzels trying to make turns clearly over dramatizing the situation. Why not just drive it like a steering wheel put the heel of your hand on the wheel and spin it around as needed when in close quarters such as parking situations and such. We've been doing this for decades this really is not a big deal.
I've driven some weird crap in my nearly 50 years of driving. In my opinion most are making a mountain out of a molehill. Yes you'll have to adapt a bit, muscle memory will change, and in no time most will be cruising around with their yolks wondering why all cars aren't controlled with a steering yoke instead of a steering wheel.
Some fair points and at the same time, there is a reason we have standardization. Why should I have retrain my muscle memory, or remember each car I drive because Tesla made a crappy design decision? It isn't like I might need to adjust the AC controls once in a while. Even that, I can use voice commands to do a lot. But every minute I am driving the car, I am touching the wheel/yoke. I get absolutely NO benefit from having a yoke, especially in its current iteration.
As for the funny pretzel movements, the yoke is pretty wide. Depending on your arm/seating position, it is easy to palm it and turn. I thought about one of the '50's era spinners but it didn't work well on the yoke. I've tried the palm on wheel technique and it really doesn't work that well on how I have the controls setup when I drive. The car should adapt to me, not the other way around.
I grew up doing a lot of adaption for vehicles in my half century of driving. I drove right hand (RHD) drive cars, I drove RHD cars on the left side of the rode. Add in LHD drive cars on the other side of the road. I rode motorcycles where the gearshift lever was on the right, and the brake on the left. Then motorcycles where that was reversed; shift on the left, brake on the right. Then different gearshift patters, 3 - up, 4-down, 1 down, 3,4,5,6 up, or down 1-2-3-4 and back to neutral after 4th gear instead of stopping. Then add in my really old bikes with foot clutches and hand shifters. Or cars where I had to manually adjust timing and so on. Then of course cars with all the shifting variations, with floor shifters, 3 on the tree, reverse opposite of first, dual range gear boxes and more.
I adapted to all these. With several of those combinations, there are safety implications and there are with the current version of the yoke if you don't just drive with the yoke all the time. Using my muscle memory in an emergency situation could have killed me. While riding with a friend in Ireland, it almost killed him when we were riding together. We met a lorry on a one lane bridge with little warning, he went right, I went left, the lorry went left (for him) our right and my friend collided head on and I escaped because I was able to override my muscle memory/reflexes for driving on the right hand side of the road at the last minute.
If I ONLY drove my S, it might have less of an impact. I could retrain my muscles to know there is now top part of the wheel and the bottom is flat and alter my touch points. Every time I go back to some other car it goes backward. Heaven help me if my wife needs to drive the S and encounters an emergency situation. This is not going to be a pretty outcome.
IMHO - this was a totally unforced error on Tesla's part. I don't know why there wasn't more involvement or review by the NHTSA. I don't hake yokes in general. I flew with them for 20 years. I don't mind retraining if there is some significant benefit. Or if there is no other way, and this is the best of bad options.
I come from an engineering background and it didn't have to be this way. This is the one single area I have tremendous buyer's remorse about. Not enough to sell the car yet, but enough to impact my future purchasing thought process. If I were to consider another Tesla, and it had the same subpar yoke and control implementation (lack of stalks), I'd be in the camp of a hard pass.
Put in a yoke with variable ratio power steering reducing the number of turns lock to lock or a well thought out drive by wire system, improve the design of the yoke itself (doesn't need to be so big, put controls on the back of the wheel too, not just jam everything on the front and even Dodge does it better here) bring the stalks back or put more thought into the current idiotic gear selector implementation and I'd sell my refreshed in a heartbeat. With these changes I'd take the yoke over the wheel.