Thermal management of steering system for autonomous vehicles

A vehicle comprising:

• a steering system having one or more processors configured to control the orientation of one or more wheels of the vehicle based on control commands;
• and
• an autonomous driving control system having one or more processors configured to:
• control the vehicle in an autonomous driving mode by generating the control commands, and
• send the control commands to the steering system, and
• wherein the one or more processors of the steering system are further configured to thermally derate the steering system based on first temperature information for the steering system when the vehicle is operating in a manual drive mode, and, when the vehicle is operating in the autonomous driving mode, the one or more processors of the autonomous driving control system are further configured to thermally derate the steering system based on second temperature information for the steering system and the one or more processors of the steering system are further configured to ignore any thermal derating signals generated at the steering system.