Many of the current cars are 100% drive by wire (ECU/power brakes/electric power steering), but that doesn't mean anything.
Probably quite a good part of the $hundred of millions price of a passenger plane is the autopilot (even 1% means $1M). And even at $1M/plane, 99% of a plane's autopilot works because it assumes that the current plane is the only one in a large vicinity of a point in space. This is assured by a centralized third party (control tower) that is not really automated but a very stressful human job (that's why the air traffic controllers are well paid). This is not the case with cars - in this case, most of the work being done is having each of the individual cars detect, with complex but not very good sensors and software, what is around them, in a swarm of other moving objects that do not communicate.
> Many of the current cars are 100% drive by wire (ECU/power brakes/electric power steering), but that doesn't mean anything.
Electric power assisted steering. Few cars on the road currently are correctly termed steer-by-wire. Actually, only the properly-optioned Infiniti Q50 comes to mind.
> Many of the current cars are 100% drive by wire (ECU/power brakes/electric power steering), but that doesn't mean anything.
You can still break when the ECU does something stupid. You can still break if you loose vacuum (engine not running), it's "just" more harder to do so.
Probably quite a good part of the $hundred of millions price of a passenger plane is the autopilot (even 1% means $1M). And even at $1M/plane, 99% of a plane's autopilot works because it assumes that the current plane is the only one in a large vicinity of a point in space. This is assured by a centralized third party (control tower) that is not really automated but a very stressful human job (that's why the air traffic controllers are well paid). This is not the case with cars - in this case, most of the work being done is having each of the individual cars detect, with complex but not very good sensors and software, what is around them, in a swarm of other moving objects that do not communicate.