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In a commodity device, I think that would make sense. A steering wheel is life critical. No system is ever fault proof, and in the case of failure, you'll definitely want a backup here, unlike in a commodity good or service where a failure doesn't matter that much.

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Isn't steering drive-by-wire here? Failure is not an option... I hope.

Pretty sure it's just a conventional rack-and-pinion with a steering wheel at the end of a collapsible column physically connected to the pinion, like almost every other car.

There's just an electric power assist that can also drive the rack without involving the driver.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/143911509282

They bring up a good point though. Society has decided that conventional steering systems are within defined failure bounds, assuming a perfectly safe driver of course. So to remove the steering wheel from a Tesla, FSD must be as fault tolerant as steering wheel failure limitations, plus some driver competence metric. Of course that also doesn't take into account the thorny issue of the intersection of safe actions on Tesla FSD actions to human driver actions. FSD has a long way to go.

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