Nope. A1. We called it “tiller bar” steering. Fun stuff!
Where was your battle taxi experience?
Here’s how I dried our socks (I feel like I’m shit-posting, but I just finished scanning a bunch of my mom’s photo albums and came across so of my old army days, so I gotta share):
I was on M1A1s in Germany, but I also drove the M11A3 (steering yoke) while I was there. When you reverse the A3 you have to turn the steering yoke opposite to what you would think.
When I joined the National Guard we had the M113A2 and M577. Both have tillers for steering.
One day I’ll scan some of my pictues too.
The Basques are now chomping at the bit. 
Some of the espresso machines I’ve seen are almost there already.
I caught something about the maintenance issue the other day. Apparently the Abrams is built on unitized modules. So if something breaks, you don’t replace the part. You replace the entire section, and it goes somewhere else to be rebuilt.
It’s meant to make field repair simpler. But that means it’s really bad for sending as aid. It means very limited availability of individual parts, and it would take too long for Ukraine to get that “somewhere else” up and running. So you’d be talking sending shit back to US forces to be rebuilt, and probably have a shortage of modules to swap in.
A lot of US military equipment seems to operate that way these days. My dad spent some time in Iraq commanding the logistics for mid-air refueling and combat search and rescue units. Most of his time was spent just finding enough engines to swap onto aircraft to keep them in the air while existing engines were down. Mechanics on the flightline didn’t have the tools, parts, etc to just get them running again. And turn around from the places that did wasn’t enough to keep planes and helicopters in the air.
So more engines.
This is apparently not the approach with the other options. Particularly the Leopards which were built with export, and thus less intense logistics in mind.
There was plenty that we could repair on the Abrams, but yes with certain assemblies you swap the entire assembly. The engine and transmission are all one piece (referred to as “the pack”) and could be replaced as a single unit by our I-level (Battalion maintenance support). All track maintenance was done at the O-level (the tank crew). Most of the turret subassemblies were O-level or I-level replaceable. The entire fire control system was D-level (depot).
Certainly as far as size and mass are concerned. The main things many of them seem to be missing are tracks and a turret.
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