Tesla’s Cybercab may have a steering wheel after all

Tesla’s Cybercab isn’t scheduled to go into production until 2026, but when it does, it may end up stuck with a vestige of the automotive past: a steering wheel.

To be sure, we still use steering wheels. But the Tesla Cybercab was meant to be the first vehicle of the new future, and there’s nothing futuristic about steering wheels.

Robyn Denholm, chair of Tesla’s board of directors, let slip in an interview with Bloomberg that the autonomous vehicle may need to include one of those round, spinny things us lowly humans use to navigate through our course, analog environment. That’s because steering wheels are kind of a big deal with regulators; they like cars to have them. If you want to sell a car without one, you need to apply for an exemption from current federal safety rules. And that comes with a lot of tradeoffs.

Tesla unveiled the Cybercab at a lavish event in Hollywood last year, with Elon Musk touting the sleek two-seater as the future of mobility. The lack of a steering wheel was intended to convey the seriousness with which Tesla was approaching autonomous technology. This would be a purpose-built autonomous vehicle, one built from the ground up to be autonomous, and only autonomous. No steering wheel meant to way to take manual control of the vehicle.

But it was also a huge risk for Tesla. Theoretically, a vehicle without pedals and a steering wheel could take months, if not years, to be approved for public roads. A more traditional-looking vehicle, meanwhile, could be released a lot sooner.

We’ve already seen what happens when a company tries to build a purpose-built autonomous vehicle. General Motors tried to get an exemption for its steering wheel-less Cruise Origin shuttles, and was left twisting in the wind for year. Eventually, GM scrapped its plans for the Origin and shut down Cruise altogether after safety lapses.

Even if Tesla were to obtain an exemption, it would only allow the company to manufacture and sell 2,500 Cybercabs per year. That would put a serious crimp in the company’s plans to pivot to an AI and robotics powerhouse.

The US Department of Transportation under Secretary Sean Duffy has said it wants to streamline the review process for exemptions to allow companies like Tesla to get more fully autonomous vehicles on the road. But it can raise the cap on the number of vehicles allowed each year without an act from Congress — and last I checked none of those guys were even working right now.

Further complicating Tesla’s plans is the current dispute between Duffy and Musk. The two seems simpatico during a site visit at Tesla’s headquarters in Austin earlier this year. But since then Duffy has been named interim administrator at NASA, and now he and Musk are involved in a tiff over a SpaceX contract. If only we lived in a country where we weren’t at the mercy of a few very powerful, very thin-skinned men!