U.S. to decide soon on GM’s request to deploy cars without steering wheels::U.S. regulators will soon decide on a petition filed by General Motors’ Cruise self-driving technology unit seeking permission to deploy up to 2,500 self-driving vehicles annually without human controls, a top auto safety official said on Wednesday.
Because the opportunity and severity of failure of the physical steering wheel is an order of magnitude or more greater than any other system that has been replaced by electronic systems in most cars.
I would argue that steerings are already fully electronically controlled in self-driving cars or have been partially controlled for a while now in traction control systems.
Putting cars aside, most large aircrafts are fly-by-wire and are really reliable in that regard.
We trust our lives to wires all the time, brakes, acceleration, airplane controls, elevators. This is no different, you just put in enough redundancy to make failures safe