Comment by justin66
9 years ago
Ok, with "really cheap" you're talking about a species of cars that I'm unfamiliar with.
Here in the US, the sensors and control fly by wire that Lexus used a few years ago have largely trickled down to the Corolla and the like as a standard feature. The differences between making autonomy work on low end and high end cars will be purely a software problem. That's not the kind of additional work that takes thirty years.
The difference is not purely a software problem.
It's a price problem since you need to install a bazillion sensors, motors and other thingies which are basically used only for one purpose.
And regarding really cheap, you're on HackerNews, ergo less likely to ever meet those. But it's usually cheap models from cheaper brands such as Dacia, Hyunday, Kia, Tata, several of the Chinese brands. I doubt most people you know actually own one :)
> It's a price problem since you need to install a bazillion sensors, motors and other thingies which are basically used only for one purpose.
That's an overstatement. You need to install sensors, many of which you'd install anyway for the modern lane-keeping and crash avoidance features. The sensors are not ruinously expensive and economy of scale incentivizes an automaker that makes both cheap and expensive cars to get these features out to the low end very quickly. As Animats pointed out, you really want to order this stuff by the million, not the thousand.
I guess I wasn't arguing with the crux of what you're saying - having a feature is generally going to be more expensive than not having it. The overstatement was very strong, especially in terms of timeline for reducing the costs of this functionality.