Before going into details, here is the question:
wouldn’t be the best to not rig the wheels at all, when making the car controls and just adding the rotations in the final scene?
After all, one has no idea how all of this will be used. It may be animated along a curve, just a simple forward translation, turning in all directions but not on a path, etc.
I tried multiple ideas and I keep coming back to this idea of leaving the wheels alone and deal with them on a shot by shot basis.
If i make them turn along a single axis - well, you end up aiming the car in a different direction and all is gone.
You use expressions - you either over complicate things to reset on the first frame, you either get into trouble with millions of rotations when people scrub on the timeline repeatedly. You still have to bake to animation, when rendering.
Paths may be an overkill on a simple translations and there is the constant cycle warning.