Back in 2020, a year after WhichEV launched, we had a great conversation with an engineer from Gordon Murray Design – in which he captured a quiet truth about autonomy. The team had already built a full-size working prototype called MOTIV, a compact, low-speed urban EV designed around the assumption that the steering wheel would eventually disappear. The interior placed two occupants facing each other, prioritising conversation and accessibility rather than driving engagement. MOTIV was capped at around 40 mph, engineered for cities rather than motorways, and built using Gordon Murray’s ultra-lightweight iStream Superlight construction to keep mass, energy use and cost down.
The engineer’s view was calm and measured, rather than evangelical. Autonomous vehicles, he said, were not waiting on a technological miracle. They were waiting on lawmakers, insurers and police forces to decide how the world was supposed to work once the human stopped being the driver. The Gordon Murray team believed that less than five years after that framework arrived, widespread deployment would follow naturally.
From a purely technical standpoint, that assessment still looks sound. MOTIV itself was never presented as a moonshot. Its specifications were deliberately modest: a relatively small battery, a short urban range, limited top speed and a tightly defined operating environment. Those constraints were not weaknesses but enablers. In low-speed, mapped, urban conditions, autonomous systems already perform at a level that is good enough most of the time. Sensors, compute and software stacks have matured steadily rather than dramatically, but with increasing reliability. Drive-by-wire systems, which MOTIV was designed around from the outset, remove much of the mechanical complexity associated with traditional vehicles. In practice, a small, purpose-built city pod with no manual controls is often easier to engineer safely than a dual-mode car that expects a distracted human to retake control at exactly the right moment. In that sense, the technology has been closer to working well for longer than many public debates acknowledge.
The real friction appears when autonomous vehicles are mixed with human drivers, and this is where projects like MOTIV quietly reveal their logic. The hardest problem for autonomy is not lane-keeping or obstacle detection, but human behaviour. Human drivers break rules, negotiate informally, make eye contact, signal intentions ambiguously and sometimes act irrationally. An autonomous system must interpret all of that while remaining conservative and legally compliant. Ironically, the safer and more predictably the autonomous vehicle behaves, the more it can be exploited by impatient or aggressive humans cutting in, forcing hesitation or assuming the machine will yield. This transitional phase, where humans and machines share the same road space, is likely to be the most uncomfortable and accident-prone period of all. It is also why low-speed, clearly identifiable vehicles like MOTIV make sense as an early step rather than an endpoint.
That reality feeds directly into the legal and institutional problems, which remain the true bottleneck. If a vehicle has no steering wheel, who is the driver in the eyes of the law? Is it the passenger, the manufacturer, the software provider or the fleet operator? When a police officer stops a vehicle, who do they speak to, and how do they verify compliance? How is fault assigned when decision-making is probabilistic rather than intentional? MOTIV implicitly challenged all of these assumptions simply by existing as a credible, steering wheel-less vehicle rather than a concept sketch. Insurance companies need clear answers before they can price risk, and courts need them before they can assign liability. Until those frameworks exist, large-scale deployment remains commercially and politically risky, regardless of how well the technology performs in controlled trials.
At a global level, this explains why autonomous adoption is likely to arrive unevenly rather than everywhere at once. When the world’s major driving populations are ranked by how quickly those legal, insurance and enforcement questions can be resolved, a clear pattern emerges:
- China
Centralised authority allows law, insurance and enforcement frameworks to be aligned quickly. City governments can mandate deployment, insurers can be directed to support it, and pilots can become policy with minimal delay. - United States
Fragmented but permissive. Individual states allow autonomous operation today, enabling rapid city-by-city rollout, such as the Tesla Robotaxi trial in Austin. Legal clarity arrives locally rather than nationally, which speeds experimentation even if it slows coherence. - Middle East (UAE, Saudi Arabia)
Top-down governance, smaller populations and prestige-driven urban projects make these regions ideal autonomy testbeds. Risk tolerance is high and approval cycles are short. - Europe (including the UK)
Technically capable but legally cautious. The UK has moved faster with primary legislation, while the EU’s need for harmonisation across member states slows widespread adoption despite strong engineering readiness. - Advanced APAC (Japan, South Korea, Singapore)
Strong technology and infrastructure, but conservative regulators and cultural risk aversion push deployment into tightly controlled zones first rather than broad consumer use. - Russia and former Soviet states
Flexible regulation and technical capability exist, but infrastructure inconsistency, insurance fragility and geopolitical constraints limit scale beyond major cities. - Latin America
Dense megacities create demand, but inconsistent enforcement, road conditions and insurance coverage delay mass adoption despite pilot programmes. - India
Extreme road entropy and mixed traffic behaviours make passenger autonomy exceptionally difficult. Logistics and controlled-use cases will arrive first. - Africa
Not a technology problem but an infrastructure and institutional one. Inconsistent road standards, limited enforcement frameworks and low policy priority push large-scale autonomy furthest into the future.
There are also softer constraints that matter just as much. Public trust, media narratives and regulatory tolerance for rare but highly visible failures all shape the pace of adoption. Autonomous vehicles are held to a far higher standard than human drivers, even though humans cause vastly more harm on the road. A single autonomous failure attracts scrutiny that thousands of human-caused crashes never receive. This asymmetry slows progress, but it is a social reality rather than a technical one, and projects like MOTIV were always designed with that scrutiny in mind.
So how far into the future before no one has a steering wheel? The most realistic answer is that steering wheels will disappear unevenly. Fleet vehicles in dense cities will lose them first, likely within the next decade in parts of China, the United States and a small number of carefully chosen European and Middle Eastern cities. Vehicles like MOTIV were never meant to replace every car on the road, but to quietly normalise a different idea of what a vehicle could be. Private ownership will lag further behind, partly due to regulation and partly due to psychology. A world where steering wheels are genuinely obsolete everywhere is more likely a 2040s story than a 2030s one. Not because the machines cannot drive, but because societies take time to decide they are ready to let go.
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