Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

x is already solved, we just need to solve the parts we haven't solved.

Videos are linked in the second paragraph.

I always question whether humans are really any better at this calculation. In the gnome example, many people will probably stop to avoid damaging their property, not see the car behind them careening forward, and end up getting rear ended anyway. In an ideal world, ethical issues like the one you presented would be major hurdles but humans aren't going to be perfectly rational in the moment of many accidents, especially the most dangerous high-speed ones when there is physically not enough time to do ethical math.

> we all still get in cars believing we'll be better than other drivers. Who's going to get in a car when any given car has an equivalent chance of making a bad decision all on its own?

Given the fact that plenty of people take taxis, rely on Uber and Lyft drivers they've never met, and take public transportation like aircraft and trains with little knowledge of the operator, this seems like a non-issue to me.

> If you're manufacturing the car from scratch just build a digital bus into the frame.

And just how would you do this?

The frame is metal - it isn't plastic; so to move control signals around, you need to have a harness. That harness, on the majority of cars today, is attached to clips that are mounted to the frame (inside the vehicle), behind the interior fascia plastic. Google "vehicle wire harness" and look at some pictures to get an idea; most of the harness is behind the dash, with additional branches leading to the doors (locks, windows, speakers, etc), up the A-pillars (rearview mirror and dome light, or other accessories), up the B-pillars (air bags, more speakers), toward the rear (gas tank, brake lights, etc), and elsewhere. There's a ton of wiring in the interior of a car.

There's a separate harness inside the engine compartment, clipped mostly to the firewall and fender area, with branches going to various spots in the compartment (too many to name); that harness is generally connected in some manner to the interior harness of the vehicle, thru a pass-thru on the firewall. This may be a connector, or just a hole the wires are routed through. Sometimes, the junction will be via a computer in the engine compartment; the point being that there are many ways it is done.

Engineers over the years have worked to reduce the number of wires and such in the wiring harness; one of the more recent ways has been the nearly universal adoption of the CAN bus. It is essentially a robust vehicle communications bus with a differentially signaled system, using two wires. Of course, there are bunch of these in a vehicle.

I think eventually they'll move to a fiber-optic system for signals, with the only wires remaining for power.

This is more important than one might think.

At the end of the day, the mass market does not really care whether a car is gas or electric.

The average Joe/Jane just has X dollars budgeted for a car and a mental model of what kind of amenities they ought to be able to get for X dollars.

Most of the "mass-market" electric cars I've seen in the $35,000 range (i3, Leaf, Bolt) look like $18,000 subcompacts. They just have electric motors inside.

You fundamentally cannot take an $18,000 car, slap an electric motor inside, and call it a $35,000 car.

If the car is going to cost $35,000, make it a $35,000 car.