Was looking at this thread late last night after a very long week, with some of the following sloshing around my mind.... too tired to type meaningfully.....
Ironically, this morning, my laptop came up with a startup/crash screen I'd never seen before with Ubuntu.
Some examples with stone-age (relative to autonomous driving) tech......
ABS has been on-road for a long time. In the rust belt, you get jacking under the tone-ring, and breakage. "Old" days, ABS light comes on, you get to keep driving.
A # of years back, a buddy addressed that issue on a customer's Smart car that showed up at his shop. A really fair guy, he felt bad about the bill he handed the lady, because at the time here, the only way to source a part was to get a complete axle shaft from Benz. The reason it HAD to be fixed NOW - because the Stability Control was missing the signal from that wheel, the lady was driving around all the time with most of the brakes automatically applied.
FFwd a few years.... a regular customer stops by to see my buddy. He'd fixed old cars for them for a lot of years, and knew they had finally bought a new vehicle - asked how they liked the new car. Customer says.... "Got a story". Husband at work, first day with the new car, wife backs it into the garage, and tweaks a side-view mirror. He gets home, she's crying..... Hey, no biggie, I'll take care of it tomorrow.
Jumps in the car next morning, turns key. Nada. Car had to be flat-decked to a dealer, expensive mirror replaced, then the Collision Avoidance system had to be calibrated, before the car would fire up.
Vehicle happened to be a Subaru, but could be anything today..... Big fun, with a kayak on top, after driving 12 hours to get to the middle of nowhere..... or just slide off the edge of a snowy rural road and lightly tweak that mirror on a tree..... good tires and AWD won't do much for you then.
My biggest issue with added-complexity is when what should be a Secondary (or less) function takes down the Primary function. Engineers know the fault-term for that situation, but, no matter..... It may well be Legal that decides what Doesn't Happen....
"With collision avoidance off-line, we don't want somebody jumping in the car, getting in an accident, then claiming they didn't know...."
Years ago, the term Peak Oil was coined...... perhaps we've already passed Peak Reliability.......
A good friend of mine ditched an ML350 a while back, after even the dealer admitted the model's (nothing to do with Autonoumous Driving) electronics were flaky.
Rgds, D.
