I took part in a team that reverse-engineered the cybertruck’s SBW system… let me just tell you, compared to european manufacturers of similar designs, the number of hardware safeguards present is about halved. Having looked at it, I’d never get behind a wheel of one.
And it’s really a matter of age. As components wear out, most SBW’s are designed to fall back into a “limp home” mode, where the car comes to as quick of a stop as possible while maintaining traffic safety, or the steering motor is at least partially controllable. Some manufacturers implement board-level redundancy, where the same motor is controlled by two functionally identical sides of the same board, so if one fails the other can take over.
With the tesla, at least as far as we could tell, if you lose SBW, you go into the wall.
take this with a grain of salt, as hardware reverse engineering tells you nothing about the software behind it.
The specific one I worked on is internal as we were assessing how OEMs use chips designed by the company for which I work. There are reverse engineering sites like a2mac which (for a pretty hefty price tag) provide you the surface level assesment (chips used, supposed functions etc). It’s really expensive though since the sheer volume of work that goes on in reversing and analyzing is incredibly tedious.
I don’t know of any open-access ones, and (at least at the time when I worked on that project) we couldn’t find any official Tesla documentation.