Right now when you buy a car you expect it to have wheels. This may change in the future when Apple starts selling cars and you'd need to check if it includes wheels or not. But it's not hard to imagine that people will continue to expect wheels in a new car for some time.
I mean, I'm not a judge, so we'll have to see, but it seems obvious to me that the existence of a wheel implies that sometimes you may need the wheel. And that if there is no wheel, it implies that the manufacturer of the car is saying that you won't need one and their own software is better in every situation.
Automotive industry wanted a gradual transition from manually driven cars to fully robotic cars. That’s fine, but they didn’t ask for inputs from software engineers about how to do it.
So they worded that that you may have either:
1) no wheels, or
2) wheels that may shear off, or
3) wheels that may shear off but continue to support weight for a while, or
4) wheels that don’t shear off under normal conditions, or
5) wheels that don’t shear off under any circumstances.
We've also reinvented a car to go with our reinvented wheel, but we've also made is so the car is useless unless you use our wheels, and by virtue of having no other function, the wheel is also pretty useless unless you use it with our car.
But don't fret. Our car will provide you with it's own desktop built into the dashboard. Our car can communicate other cars, but only those of the same model, and even if our car doesn't have support for something you need yet, don't worry, as we'll build it directly into your car soon!
Replace the word "car" with "wheel" to more realistically compare with the iPad functional design and you'll spot an awful lot of alloy wheel designs that untrained observers will be able to distinguish only by the badge.
Ah, today, probably not. But if it was proven safe enough to not need one, sure. I'd look at the safety data and decide.
But the point is, no manufacturer would sell one without a wheel either because they know it wouldn't sell. This is just a change to not require one to pass safety tests. The car still has to actually pass the safety tests though.
They could be working on other things instead. If your car is missing a wheel, you can absolutely add a wheel chair ramp in the back, and that will improve the experience for some people who might potentially be drawn towards your car, but it's not going to sell your car on the mass market, because your car is missing a wheel.
Don't get me started on low-profiles wheels. 3x more expensive tires and poor ride quality, all for just the bling factor. It's getting hard to find new cars that even leave the factory with standard wheels anymore.
Wheels are also great at telling you where a car is going. You can see subtle changes in the direction of the wheels much better than you can intuit the car's direction by looking at its body.
No we don't have laws about wheels. We have laws about cars. Cars are not wheels. Wheels are merely a critical component of cars. And that distinction is absolutely vital to the wheel analogy.
reply