I know Google has gone the route of removing the steering wheel but it seems that even if vehicles have self-driving capabilities some level of "manual override

I know Google has gone the route of removing the steering wheel but it seems that even if vehicles have self-driving capabilities some level of "manual override" will be desirable especially if you're not in a densely populated area. Using a car to pull a stuck vehicle out of the mud is certainly a valid use-case that not everyone will want to give up. Yeah it might become illegal to use manual driving modes on public highways or something but I can't imagine that we're going to be strictly limited to what the GPS software says is a valid destination and I'd find it impressive if software was written for every action people do with cars. That being said these technology companies always seem to move towards smaller feature sets that intersect with the use-cases of the largest user bases and power users are often forced to hack together their own custom solutions if they don't fall into the general population of users so if anything this article is a warning to not let the Apple's and Google's define how we use self-driving cars.