Autoliv Unveils Foldable, Retractable Steering Wheel for Fully Autonomous Vehicles

Autoliv and Tensor unveiled an innovative new steering wheel that folds completely into the dashboard, which they demonstrated at CES 2026. This innovation addresses one of the most pressing practical issues with high-level autonomous vehicles: put the car in Level 4 mode, where it does all of the driving for you but only under certain conditions and without human intervention, and the wheel simply vanishes, giving passengers more knee room to stretch their legs or do some work.

The system has a dual mode design, which allows you to yank the wheel back under human control at any time and it will operate normally. When you allow the car to take control, the wheel effortlessly folds away again, completely smooth. That’s not all; a center console screen will slide over to fill the space before neatly folding away when you take the wheel back, allowing you to resume driving.

We can’t forget about safety, either; in manual mode, the wheel has an airbag to help protect you in the uncommon event that you have to stop unexpectedly. When the wheel is parked, a specific passenger airbag located in the instrument panel deploys. Both settings provide the same level of protection, indicating that the system is intelligent enough to change and adapt to the scenario at hand, rather than depending on a one-size-fits-all solution.

Fabien Dumont, Autoliv’s top tech honcho, says that safety in the automotive world needs to become much more sophisticated, and that this project demonstrates how hardware can change up to match the way the vehicle is operating at any given time, resulting in greater comfort without sacrificing any of the safety we all require. As a result, this foldaway steering wheel should meet all of Autoliv’s safety criteria, which have been established high for decades.

Meanwhile, Tensor CEO Jay Xiao believes that this flexibility will be really beneficial to some of us. Many people cherish the flexibility of letting a car take over when they choose, but you won’t always want to let go of the wheel. This wheel allows you to accomplish it, and we’ll see it in full production with the Tensor Robocar, a personal electric autonomous vehicle. The company is talking about starting production in the second part of this year and rolling it across the United States, the European Union, and the Middle East.
[Source]