“No steering wheel, no pedals,” Tesla teased on X before the launch.
Page F2From§Eachthe early evening edition — 3 September 2026
Tesla deletes the wheel to cure fear of losing control, after recalling two million cars for lacking it.
As it ran on the front
I called Tesla's customer line yesterday, not to complain, just to ask a question, and I want to say up front, the young man was patient with me, because I am an old man who does not understand new cars, and this new car of theirs does not have a steering wheel in it, and I could not get my head around that part.
I told him, look, I've had my Buick twenty-two years, the fan belt shrieks the minute it rains, but there is a wheel in front of me, and when I want to go left I turn it, and that has never once struck me as the flaw in the design. He said, that's exactly the fear we built this car to solve, sir. People worry about losing control. So we took the wheel out. I didn't argue with him. He works there. I don't. Who am I to tell the company what its own customers are afraid of.…
…(cont) But I got to thinking about it that night out in the garage, next to the toolbox, because that's where I do my thinking, and I remembered something from a few years back, and I want to be fair, so bear with me while I get it straight. In March of 2018 one of their cars, a Model X, was in a fatal crash in California, and the company confirmed the car was in Autopilot mode at the time. The recorder showed the driver's hands were not on the wheel when it happened. I'm not saying that's the same car. I'm saying it's the same wheel.
Then in December of 2023 — and I know I have this one right, it was in the paper — Tesla recalled two million cars in this country. Two million. The story said that covers almost every Tesla sold here since Autopilot started in 2015. The reason given was insufficient safety controls in the Autopilot system. Not too much control. Not the wrong kind. Insufficient.
So now I've got two things sitting on my workbench that I can't get to lie flat next to each other, which is the whole reason I called the company, to have somebody smarter than me walk me through it. A car that the maker itself recalled, two million times over, for not having enough control built in — and now that same maker is selling a car with no control in it at all, nothing to hold, no wheel, and telling people the wheel was the thing making them nervous.
I asked the young man, does the new car run on the same driving system, more or less, the one from the recall. He said he'd have to check and could he put me on hold. I held. My dog fell asleep on the porch waiting with me, that's how long I held.
He came back and said the new one, the Cybercab, isn't widely available yet, so he couldn't speak to specifics on the software, but the fear part, the losing-control part, that they had definitely solved.
Oh — before you go, one more thing, and I promise it's quick. The recall, the one for two million cars, insufficient safety controls — that got fixed with a software update, is that right, the car still had a wheel to fall back on while they fixed it. This new one doesn't have that. So if the software has a bad day again, I just want to know, in a car with nothing to grab, who exactly is supposed to be the one losing control.
“They recalled two million of these things for not having enough safety controls in the driving software, and their fix for that is a car with no steering wheel, no pedals, nothing for a human being to grab when the software has a bad day. That's not curing the fear, that's removing the last thing a rider could've done about it. They're not selling you confidence, they're selling you a car you can't argue with.”
“Look, removing the steering wheel isn't a safety rollback, it's a customer experience breakthrough — people are afraid of the wheel, so we solved the wheel. The 2018 crash was a driver-attentiveness issue and the 2023 recall was fully remediated via over-the-air update, which, yes, is the same kind of software now running a car with no manual backup, but — did I just connect those, that's not — the fear-of-losing-control research speaks for itself.”
The receipts
The new Cybercab embodies Elon Musk’s vision of cars that drive themselves, but it is not clear when the vehicle will be widely available.
· U.S.-based automobile manufacturer Tesla confirms that one of their Model X cars was placed into Autopilot mode moments before a fatal crash in California, United States. Tesla's Autopilot system is n from the morgue, 31 Mar 2018
· Tesla recalls two million cars in the United States due to insufficient safety controls within the vehicles' AutoPilot system. This applies "to almost every Tesla sold in the US since the Autopilot fe from the morgue, 13 Dec 2023
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.