03:15 15-07-2026

NHTSA Signals Steering Wheels May Disappear From Purpose-Built Robotaxis

NHTSA chief Jonathan Morrison says driverless cars may not need a steering wheel at all, a shift that could reshape Tesla's Cybercab and the robotaxi industry.

The United States is once again approaching a question that long felt like pure science fiction: does a driverless car actually need a steering wheel and pedals? NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison told CNBC that if a vehicle is designed from the ground up so a human never drives it, requiring traditional controls simply stops making sense.

This isn’t about stripping steering wheels from every car on the road — it’s about purpose-built robotaxis. NHTSA has already proposed rewriting federal safety standards, including dropping the requirement for a conventional brake pedal in autonomous vehicles, though that change is still an open proposal going through public comment rather than a finalized rule. If the approach gets locked into regulation, manufacturers could design driverless vehicles as their own category of transport instead of a regular car with autopilot bolted on.

The biggest winner could be Tesla. The Cybercab, unveiled in 2024, was conceived from the start without a steering wheel or pedals — a fully autonomous vehicle built purely to carry passengers. But regulatory uncertainty pushed the company to allow versions with traditional controls, and prototypes with a wheel and pedals have already turned up in testing. New rules could push the project back toward its original vision.

Still, dropping the steering-wheel version entirely probably isn’t in Tesla’s interest. For robotaxi operators, a car with no driver’s seat makes sense: fewer parts, lower cost, more freedom in cabin layout. But private buyers may be drawn to a different scenario — using the car personally by day and letting it earn money in an autonomous ride-hailing fleet the rest of the time. For that use case, the wheel and pedals remain both a safety net and a selling point.

Removing manual controls changes the rules around certification, liability, insurance, repairs and emergency handling. If a vehicle assumes no human will ever intervene, its maker has to prove the system can handle not just ideal roads but road work, poor markings, pedestrians, police, snow, tow trucks and sensor failures too.

For now, the topic stays largely theoretical outside the US. A steering-wheel-free robotaxi needs more than just a vehicle — it needs a legal framework, mapping, connectivity, service infrastructure, clear liability rules after a crash, and insurers ready to underwrite it. Even if Tesla, Waymo or other companies move faster in the US, a direct transplant of that model elsewhere shouldn’t be expected any time soon.

But the direction is clear: the driverless car is slowly stopping being just a regular vehicle with smart software bolted on. If the steering wheel eventually disappears from a production robotaxi, it won’t be a design gimmick — it will be an admission that autonomous transport is developing its own automotive architecture.