Did you laugh out loud or at least raise an eyebrow when you heard that the revised Tesla Model S and Model X would not be sold with a steering wheel, but a sort of stick? If you really didn’t find it funny and thought it could be a safety hazard, then you’re on the same page with NHTSA, which is still unsure whether the yoke meets Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards.
And there is a chance that it might also end up not being legal outside the United States, so you would think Tesla had a backup plan in case it did. Well, if you browse the official online configurator, you won’t find a traditional steering wheel among any of the options – it would then seem that Tesla is giving it its all, but how The Drive discovered, this is not entirely accurate.
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After playing with the URL of one of the images generated by the configurator, they found that Tesla does have at least one photo showing the new interior with a conventional round rudder. This is not accessible to users just by configuring a car through the application, but you can find the image by slightly changing the link itself.
Well, as the source article points out, Tesla has since removed the image and you can no longer access it via the link, but they saved the photo they found and here it is. We are sure that this photo will be much more pleasant for many people who simply did not understand why Tesla bet everything and thought that being the only option was a little strange.
Tesla clearly did not want you to see this photo – which is why it is no longer available – but it would be positively stupid if the manufacturer had not considered equipping the car with a traditional wheel. Sure, the yoke may be approved for use on public roads in some countries, but in others it may not be, and Tesla would still like to sell as many cars as it can, so it makes a lot of sense to have both and a tailor the vehicles for each individual market. .