This issue with the steering wheel is truly frightening, but it does appear to be unique with this particular Gravity.
Unfortunately, no car brand is immune from such hazardous issues. I had a Mercedes SL55 AMG that was the first Mercedes to use a brake-by-wire system. I was exiting a parking garage in Chicago. The car braked normally as I approached the exit arm at the pay booth, but when I then rolled down to the street-level exit, I had no brakes and rolled right into oncoming traffic on a downtown street. It was incredibly hairy, and I managed to stop the car only by steering it into a curb. Mercedes claimed the mechanical back-up system would still have responded to the brake pedal if I just put enough pressure on it. Believe me, I was standing on it for dear life.
It was never publicly announced, but Mercedes quietly took the system out of production in the next model year.
Less hair-raising was an incident with my Volvo 144 sedan some years earlier. I was entering an interstate exit ramp and went to downshift the manual transmission. The shift lever and its array of dangling linkages let go and came out of the console in my hand. I experienced something similar years later when the aforementioned Mercedes SL automatic shift lever failed.
Then there was my bedeviled 1998 Corvette that kept going into limp mode -- something that multiple shop visits had not resolved. The last time it happened I was cruising down the inside lane of I-95 in Connecticut, running alongside a concrete barrier wall. This was a 12-lane stretch of highway (6 each way) with heavy traffic averaging close to 80 mph. Suddenly my car was limited to 8 mph. There was no place to pull off to the left, and I had to get across 5 lanes to the right shoulder. I thought I was going to die. I got out of the car, walked down the nearest exit to a gas station, called a taxi, and never got back in the car. (It was a company car, and they took it off my hands.)
