Tesla Model S Steering Wheel Will Work Using Steer By Wire

May 25, 2021

By Henry Farkas

By now, all the Tesla fans who frequent this site have seen the pictures of the steering yoke on the refreshed Model S. It’s similar in shape to the steering yokes on airplanes. Of course, nobody thinks that the refreshed Model S can fly so there’s no indication that pushing forward on the Model S yoke will make the nose of the Tesla point downward or that pulling back on the yoke will make the nose of the Tesla point upward. That sort of thing is strictly for airplanes.

Tesla Model S Yoke Steering Wheel

There’s a reason that steering wheels on cars are round, or nearly round. That reason is that in tight spaces, you sometimes need to turn the wheel more than 180 degrees in order to make the front wheels get all the way to the left or to the right. This is a leftover from when cars sometimes came without power steering. For those of you old enough to remember that long ago time, parking without power steering was a bit more work than we wanted to do. There was more mechanical advantage, and thus less force required, to turn the wheel all the way to the stop if the amount you had to turn the wheel was more than 180 degrees. In order to do that, you had to go hand over hand, and it was helpful if the rim of the steering wheel was pretty much in the same place no matter where the front wheels of the car was facing because when you’re looking out the rear window of the car, you can’t keep track of where the rim of the steering wheel happens to be.

So I started thinking about how Tesla could deal with issues like this now that they’re putting the yoke steering on the Model S. I’d have dropped this essay a week ago if I’d been able to figure it out, but I was unable. Today, I decided to consult the Oracle of YouTube to get an answer. The trouble with consulting YouTube is that some of the people who put up videos aren’t any smarter than I am. I checked out a few of those videos. One had a guy who put a model of a yoke on his regular steering wheel and tried to steer with just that part of the wheel. He could, but it didn’t tell me anything about what the engineers at Tesla were probably thinking. Another guy actually used a hacksaw on his steering wheel to make it into a yoke. He could steer, but that was also not enlightening. Finally, I found a YouTube video that gave a theory that I could get behind.

To me, a steering yoke makes sense only if you don’t need to turn the yoke any more than ninety degrees in either direction, just the way it is in an airplane. That way, there’s no hand-over-hand movement when you’re not looking at the steering wheel. I was stumped by this because steering would be too quick at highway speeds. There are already collisions when someone jerks the steering wheel too hard. These would be more frequent if the steering was so sensitive to slight movements.

The video gives the answer. What you don’t see in the pictures of the yoke steering are pictures of the steering mechanism. Now remember, the person who made this video is theorizing. I’m writing about the video because I believe his theory is correct. The person who made the video goes by the moniker, TenXchange.

Here’s the theory. Tesla is eliminating the traditional rack and pinion steering in which the steering wheel is physically connected to the steering mechanism by a stiff rod. Instead, the steering yoke is electrically connected to the steering mechanism, a steer-by-wire system. That’s helpful for two reasons.

First, there can be a variable steering ratio. When you’re going fast, on the highway, steering the car is less sensitive so a quick jerk on the wheel will make your car point in the direction you want to go, but it won’t send the car into an uncontrolled skid. When you’re going slow, and parking the car, you won’t need to turn the yoke very far to get the wheels in the direction you want them to go, and you won’t need all that hand-over-hand motion of the steering wheel to get the car parked. In between, on city streets when you’re not going as fast, the steering ratio can be more sensitive than on the highway but less sensitive than when parking.

Steer by wire diagram

The second reason for having steer-by-wire according to TenXchange is that there will come a time when your Tesla with FSD will actually be autonomous. You may want to send your car out to work as a taxi for you while you stay home and do something else, or you might just want your car to be your chauffeur while you do something else besides driving. I have to say that even though I paid for FSD when I bought my Tesla a year or so ago, I’ll be surprised if this happens in my lifetime. Anyway, if actual FSD does come to pass, and if my car is a much safer driver than most human beings, then I wouldn’t want a human being to be able to take over the driving by just turning the steering wheel or tapping the brake. That could cause an accident.

My car won’t ever have steer by wire or brake by wire since it doesn’t have those things now, and I doubt that Elon Musk is going to recall half a million Teslas with FSD in order to convert them to steer-by-wire and brake-by-wire. But the newer cars, the ones with yoke steering, may well have those features.

Tesla has an event to release the first redesigned Model S cars to owners on June 3rd.

You Can Now Track Tesla’s Robotaxi Deployment

June 15, 2025

By Karan Singh

Not a Tesla App

Thanks to Tesla Yoda on X, we have found out that Tesla’s Robotaxi fleet is registered on the Texas Department of Transportation’s public-facing Automated Vehicle Deployment website. This makes the fleet’s movements publicly viewable and trackable, and marks a first for Tesla.

This isn’t just any old FSD test - this is the first officially acknowledged, government-tracked, and sanctioned deployment of a Tesla Model Y operating as a ride-share vehicle. But that’s not all - Texas DOT’s tracker notes that the Tesla does not have a safety driver.

View on the Map

Visitors to the Texas DOT website can filter for “Tesla”, and see, currently, a single active vehicle operating in the Austin Metro area. According to the state’s official data, here’s what we know:

Company: Tesla

Description: Ride-share service

Status in Texas: Testing

Safety Driver: No

The final point is definitely the most significant here. While Tesla has been testing FSD with safety drivers for some time in Austin and LA for employee-only testing, this is the first time that a vehicle has been officially registered and deployed on public roads without a human behind the wheel for safety.

The fact that there is no safety driver officially shifts the liability from the occupant of the driver’s seat to Tesla, for the first time in a public setting. That’s already pretty significant - we previously dove into how Tesla plans to insure its own vehicles, and potentially owner vehicles in the Robotaxi fleets.

The status currently lists Tesla as “Testing,” confirming that the service isn’t available to the public, but this is expected to change in the coming weeks.

This testing phase is likely part of a short but crucial period that lets Tesla capture data on the safety levels of its current iteration of Unsupervised FSD without a driver supervising. Tesla already stated that they’d be avoiding difficult areas, so this testing can also expose additional areas Tesla may want to avoid, such as school zones or blind driveways.

Tesla will need to prove, both internally and externally, that FSD Unsupervised has the necessary performance to safely navigate the streets without any incidents.

Regulatory Milestone

For years, the concept of a Tesla Robotaxi has been a future promise. Now, it's a present-day reality, albeit in a testing capacity.

Having an official government body list a Tesla as an active, driverless vehicle shows that they’ve been able to clear regulatory hurdles, which Tesla has often pointed to as the issue. It demonstrates a level of confidence from both Tesla and Texas regulators in the system's capabilities.

While it's just a single vehicle for today, we’ll likely see this list slowly expand over time. Alongside being able to track Robotaxi incidents at the City of Austin’s website, we’ll be able to closely watch Tesla’s progress with its first Robotaxi deployments.

Tesla FSD in Europe: June Update

June 14, 2025

By Karan Singh

Not a Tesla App

The road to bringing FSD to Europe has been a long and complex one and filled with regulatory and bureaucratic hurdles. Elon Musk, as well as other members of Tesla’s AI team, have previously voiced their grievances with the regulatory approval process on X.

However, it appears that there is finally some progress in getting things moving with recent changes to upcoming autonomy regulations, but the process still seems slow.

Waiting on the Dutch

Elon commented on X recently, stating that Tesla is waiting for approval from Dutch authorities and then the EU to start rolling out FSD in Europe. Tesla is focusing on acquiring approvals from the Dutch transportation authority, which will provide them with the platform they need to gain broader acceptance in Europe. Outside of the Netherlands, Tesla is also conducting testing in Norway, which provides a couple of avenues for them to obtain national-level approval.

The frustration has been ongoing, with multiple committee meetings bringing up autonomy regulation but always pulling back at the last second before approving anything. The last meeting on Regulation 157, which governs Automated Lane Keeping Systems, concluded with authorities from the UK and Spain requesting additional time to analyze the data before reaching a conclusion.

Tesla, as well as Elon, have motioned several times for owners to reach out to their elected representatives to move the process forward, as it seems that Tesla’s own efforts are being stymied.

This can seem odd, especially since Tesla has previously demoed FSD working exceptionally smoothly on European roads - and just did it again in Rome when they shared the video below on X.

FSD Supervised testing in Rome, Italy

Pending regulatory approval pic.twitter.com/TXh3uQIfrx
— Tesla Europe & Middle East (@teslaeurope) June 12, 2025

DCAS Phase 3

While the approval process has been slow, Kees Roelandschap pointed out that there may be a different regulatory step that could allow FSD to gain a foothold in Europe.

According to Kees, the European Commission is now taking a new approach to approving ADAS systems under the new DCAS Phase 3 regulations. The Commission is now seeking data from systems currently operational in the United States that can perform System-Initiated Maneuvers and don’t require hands-on intervention for every request.

This is key because those are two of the core functionalities that make FSD so usable, and it also means that there may not be a need to wait years for proper regulations to be written from scratch. Now, the Commission will be looking at real-world data based on existing, deployed technology, which could speed up the process immensely.

What This Means

This new, data-driven regulatory approach could be the path for Tesla to reach its previous target of September for European FSD. While the cogs of bureaucracy are ever slow, sometimes all it takes is a little data to have them turn a bit faster in this case.

Alongside specific countries granting approval for limited field testing with employees, there is some light at the end of the tunnel for FSD in Europe, and hopes are that a release will occur by the end of 2025. With Europe now looking to North America for how FSD is performing, Tesla’s Robotaxi results could also play a role.