Tesla started charging the public for rides this week in a car that was never built with a steering wheel or pedals. Which sounds like a gimmick until you think about what a driver actually costs a car company. Every mass-produced vehicle in history got designed around the person operating it. Steering column, pedal box, instrument cluster, mirrors, a whole airbag layout for the driver's seat. Once nobody's driving, you get to throw all of that engineering away, and the vehicle gets radically…