Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car
medium.com
medium.com
The main reason for this is that current self-driving tech has plateaued with most companies going with the redundancy based approach (let's have 3 LIDARs instead of 1, and make that 4 IR sensors on each side instead of 2 etc.) simply because there is no revolutionary new tech that is a panacea to current L1 problems.
Sadly, explaining this to investors is next to impossible, so everyone keeps selling the same idea with a few more whistles as the next big thing while everyone is waiting for the big tech breakthrough that makes actual self-driving cars possible.
Until then, expect many more controlled environment (eg. airports or freeways where traffic is mostly smooth flowing, or roads with perfectly marked stop signs and pavement paint).
( here is the 2016 report: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/deade5b7-5b10-4b25... , found here: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/disen... )
Google 636k
Cruise 10k
Delphi 3k
Nissan 3k
Mercedes 0.7k
BMW 0.6k
Tesla 0.6k
Ford 0.6k
Bosch, Honda, Volkswagen 0khttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point
Or maybe there's some notation collision...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Levels_of_drivi...
no driving automation (level 0) to full driving automation (level 5)
System is fundamentally unsuitable for automotive or other timing-critical applications. Engineered wrong from the beginning. It's a dead end.
Cruise Automation can produce a good demo. Shortcuts have been taken to produce good-looking results.
Don't be deceived. No car running the current software (or any software derived from it) will ever operate reliably.
Posted below, you will find a deleted comment from one of my fellow Cruise employees. That comment is accurate in its characterization of both Kyle and Cruise's technology.
QUOTE:
"Cruise employee here. throwaway for obvious reasons. It needs to be said that this is entirely marketing smoke and mirrors. The Cruise platform is significantly behind most other players in the market, and is having many many technical problems because of shortsighted leadership on Kyle's part, including high level people quitting (the head of planning and controls left last month because of Kyle, and more are threatening to quit) The reason I'm saying this is that this sort of public "everything is fine, we are the best" posturing leaks inwards. The opposite is very much true. Employees are very upset with Kyle because of things just like this. I make no exaggeration when I say Kyle is a mean-spirited, selfish person in private, and is very quick to publicly take credit for the work of others that he has emotionally and verbally abused. It's truly one of the most toxic environments I've ever been a part of."
How much of the GM options have vested for the founders?
But as an individual: I'm vesting while I work to satisfy the conditions for a GM payout.
I suspect that we'll see a progression like:
1) Well-regulated urban and highway environments
2) Well-regulated rural environments
3) Moderately regulated urban and rural environments
4) Poorly regulated rural environments
5) Poorly regulated urban environments
And I think we'll probably be stuck on #1 for a while. I would also venture that most companies claiming to "be there" or "almost there" are referring to #1 as well.
I also think that it's possible that politicians may try to legislate a transition up that list as that first case starts taking off (greater traffic enforcement, better signage/infrastructure, more rigorous driver training, etc).
Pretty sure you can't legislate those out of existence. And sadly I think the fact that these vehicles are being developed and tested in Silicon Valley is either a cause or an symptom of their probably inability to deal with those kinds of conditions.
Company that has all the roads and surroundings scanned and knows exactly where the car is at all times is at a huge advantage.
Partially observed world gets your head hurting. Not modelling other cars practically makes everything useless.
If you can't hallucinate everything around you as close as possible, the problem gets very very difficult.
I'm pretty sure there are companies close to solving the problem, as they have more data and some also know practically every road in the modern world.
Modelling and tracking other cars is a bigger issue, including pedestrians.
Aren't there very reliable ways to model other cars? Something as big as a car can't move very unpredictably in a millisecond-to-millisecond basis. And at the end of the day, all you need to do is be able to model the behavior of your car.
If car in front of me starts to swerve over on a collision course with my car, my car can note the probability of a collision a long (computer-long) time before it really needs to do anything about it. Knowing full-well its own braking, swerving and acceleration capabilities at any given speed, it should be able to know when it _must_ take action to avoid the actions of another, and it doesn't even have to rely on reaction time.
No, I think the real problem here is for cars to do things like understand _context_ of a situation, like, for instance, how can it tell that there's a bus in front of me turning around that's going to be clear of my way in a moment vs. a tree that's been felled? That's something that computers are and will probably continue to be terrible at until they can closely mimic the capabilities of the human brain.
Unscented Kalman filters and particle filters are used for that - they are pretty good if you sample environment with >10Hz rate. Most of what you said has been taken car of pretty well, those aren't really hot issues anymore. Also, the thinking these days is that humans (even mediocre) can do a good job driving using eyes only and more robust camera solutions based on deep learning are here. Their problem is inference speed as HW is not fast enough to allow FHD or 4K input feed to be processed realtime, so imagery has to be downscaled significantly, leading to errors. Similarly, tracking other cars only depends on how big supercomputer can you fit into your trunk.
The whole conversation is unfortunately poisoned by endless wishful thinking instead of discussing hard evidence. I mean there is still a large proportion of people on here who think Tesla will somehow leapfrog Google because they have all those cars out there streaming the raw video data from their umpteen cameras back to Tesla HQ, utilizing an imaginary mobile communications standard that leapfrogs LTE by two orders of magnitude that they invented alongside their LIDAR-less L5 autonomous car software in record time.
My personal skepticism on this subject has made me very unpopular at parties (well I don't actually go to parties, but you know) where lots of techy types go. Also earned me lots of downvotes here.
The truth is, none of these companies is any close to full autonomy. Full autonomy _testing_ will begin once they deploy cars without backup drivers, to actually see how bad can things go without watchful human supervision.
Their in-house developed Autopilot v2 is still worse than the third-party (MobileEye) Autopilot v1 they got rid of last year.
Their AP 2 is actually In-House AP 1.0, of course it does less than MobileEye v 15.0 or whatever.
Looks to me that they designed a mass-producible car outfitted with self-driving systems (which is very cool!). But they are only just starting to do employee testing. Waymo has been doing that for years.
Waymo has since been proceeding a bit more cautiously, and their efforts at this point are oriented more towards smoothing out ride feel, testing under adverse weather conditions, and their early rider program in Phoenix.
Whether it's Waymo or GM to officially be the first to have an empty car driving on public roads, the other won't be far behind, though the victory will be largely symbolic. GM's cars still need a lot of polish, and Waymo needs better manufacturing partnerships.
I'd like to know more, do you have a source for these claims?
But Reuters reported they intend to put 'thousands' of autonomous Bolts on the road in 2018:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-gm-autonomous-exclusive/e...
Cruise has released some impressive demos on their YouTube page, of vehicle driving around downtown SF:
Cruise reported to the California DMV that they averaged on unplanned disengagement every 180 miles through 2016:
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/disen...
What's also interesting is that Cruise is hiring 'autonomous vehicle support advisors', which is for remote assistance. Not something you need to do if you plan to have a test driver in the front seat for year(s) to come:
https://getcruise.com/careers/listing/791711
Also, because Kyle Vogt said so, and he's never bullshitted me before, he's got credibility.
> It's a prediction, I can't provide a source for events that haven't occurred.
Using the words "they will" makes it sound like an assertion. How are you so confident about "events that haven't occurred" will indeed occur? You listed out reports and demos, none of which necessarily suggest that "Late this year or 2018 they'll have cars driving around empty"? Do you have additional inside information that the rest of us don't have?
> Also, because Kyle Vogt said so, and he's never bullshitted me before, he's got credibility.
Is this a serious comment?
My points are that GM is doing well, and that they are scaling up their operation to a degree that wouldn't make sense if they didn't intend to deliver the minimum viable commercial robotaxi service sometime over the next year or so.
The counterpoints are that 'this smells like PR bullshit', and that Kyle Vogt is an asshole (because no asshole has ever successfully led a technology company before).
You guys have nothing substantiative to argue with.
I literally said none of that...
Isn't this disengagement rate several orders of magnitude too high to support fully autonomous vehicles?
1. https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/946b3502-c959-4e3b... (Page 3 of PDF)
Titles like these are what happen when marketers optimize everything towards clicks, and don't care about actual impact on the brand itself.
That doesn't address the question of exactly what 'self-driving' means in this context, but many articles on the topic suffer from this problem.
A: We built the first real self-driving car.
B: What about the Waymo car?
A: That's not a _real_ self-driving car.
Implies L5
Paragraph 3: "The car we’re unveiling today is actually our 3rd generation self-driving car"
ie L3, you need a driver paying attention like in a Tesla(?)
Tesla hasn't beat anybody to anything. AP2 is still behind Ap1, which uses a single camera and mobileye's comparitavely tiny Eyeq3 chip.
Redesigning the software of a production car and actually integrating the tech at the factory-level gets you much closer to a mass-volume car than making some fancy software with a sensor package that you bolt to the top of a minivan.
Despite what the mountain of "Autonomous vehicles are around the corner" PR articles say there's still a lot of problems to be worked out before we see any fully autonomous vehicles for sale.
And you need to work out your prototypes issues before you start mass producing something so that you mass produce something that you can actually sell.
Uh, you say this as if you truly think that this is NOT the actual premise of marketing.
Volvo is doing well with their self-driving car, but admits the hardware cost is over $100K per car at present.
I'm sure there's political pressure within GM for Cruise to announce these sorts of "wins" to keep management satisfied their money is being well-spent. But the breathless tone of this write-up conveys a sense of accomplishment that doesn't actually exist, and the failure to set reasonable expectations will just make the disillusionment that much stronger when it happens.
Here's what I mean. Imagine this situation:
You're pulling into your driveway in your self-driving car, and one of your kids left a lawn gnome there, blocking it. The car won't go forward because there's an obstacle.
Simultaneously, a driver looking at their phone and not paying attention comes careening down the road. They're clearly going to rear-end you, hard. You COULD just pull forward and out of the way.....but the car won't, because of the lawn gnome. It can't know the lawn gnome doesn't matter in comparison to the damage your car is about to suffer.
Imagine this flip scenario:
You're pulling into your driveway in your self-driving car, and one of your kids, a toddler, is in your way. The car won't go forward because there's an obstacle. Otherwise, same situation as above. Now, you ABSOLUTELY do NOT want to pull forward, because you'd rather get rear-ended than run over your child.
Even if you want to nitpick this exact scenario, surely you can think of a hundred similar contexts yourself, where driving involves understanding the value of different pieces of the car's immediate environment. A car cannot know the value of a child versus a lawn gnome, nor can it reliably detect the difference.
Even if such a situation only arises once in a thousand days of driving, with hundreds of millions of people on the road everyday, that's thousands of times per day. That's really bad.
Is it statistically better than the amount of harm done by human drivers? Possibly. But 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? It's just like getting in a car with a drunk driver.
Who's going to sign up for that? Not me, that's for sure.
> 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.
So if they eliminate all of the accidents that are caused that way, but increase the number of garden-gnome related accidents...wouldn't that be worthwhile?
Another, less flippant way to say it: yes, we can imagine scenarios in which the number of accidents will increase. But what is the relative frequency of those types of accidents compared to run-of-the-mill rear-end, red-light run, lane change due to inattentiveness?
There's also the issue of what a self-driving car could do... and what they WILL do. Much technology COULD be amazing... if companies did not function in the ways that they actually do. Because of that, technology often fails to meet any of the promises made. Development is supposed to be cheap and fast, and safety and security get left at the door. No company is held liable for such things, and it would be expensive and bothersome to fix, so they're not about to bother.
Humans may or may not be less situationally aware overall, but we have the gnome question down cold. Cars don't. They see "obstacle in front of bumper radar."
The OPs point is well-taken because it illustrates a technical risk that few are discussing: the "last 1%" of self-driving software may be equivalent to solving AGI.
I don't see why the "last 1%" problem needs to be solved when we have hundreds of thousands of accidents every year caused by people not paying attention, not reacting in a timely fashion, and driving unsafely; all problems that computers are likely to excel at.
Exactly right. You need a semantic world model, reasoning and prediction. AGI bottlenecks self-driving, assistants, text understanding…
Superhuman sensors will be great, but you really can't dodge AGI for true full self-driving.
Considering humans can barely stop when they should, I don't give them a high likelihood to also be able to have the situational awareness and make the multiple split second decisions required to both decide to, and take action upon, directing their car towards the least-valuable obstacle in an emergency. By the time they decide what to do they will probably be rear ended.
Edit: your examples also ignores that with self driving cars, people won't be put in these situations in the first place. A driver not paying attention to the road, looking at their phone would be... not a safety hazard.
The OP's scenario is contrived to make a clear example, but it happens regularly when you're driving: you're forced to make a choice between acting and possibly hitting something, or doing nothing and being hit.
We don't need self driving cars to solve the 80% case of preventing human drivers from hitting things. We need radar and auto-braking, which already exists. Full autonomy requires solving the harder problems.
[0]https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
If all the cars were autonomous, it would more likely to be a matter of frustration than safety: the gnome causes a traffic jam because the cars won't endanger the passenger by driving into the opposing lane. Then what? They find an alternate route? They automatically call in a service crew to clear the road? Not the end of the world.
I also think people incorrectly think that the moral choice dilemmas that self-driving cars will face are somehow the difficult part. What will happen is that we will provide valuation functions that are somewhat close to our intuitive collective understanding of value of life in different forms. Computers use them to evaluate these situations and we as a society just adapt to the new ethics of the AI age.
I also want to see the CEO, CTO, and other C-level execs of the auto company to release a legally binding agreement holding themselves personally liable for criminal negligence if the vehicle is later found to have obvious flaws - obvious determined by an independent group of several thousand unaffiliated volunteer experienced software engineers.
Right now, if a car company slapped a 'self driving' car together that was designed to seek and destroy pre-schoolers, no one would say boo. Certainly not the courts. Toyota killed people by having ludicrously egregiously bad development practices (their developers did not even have access to a bug tracker... they followed 6 of 94 industry standard recommended practices... and worse) - and the courts acquitted them of negligence. That is disgusting, and makes it impossible for any reasonable person to trust any auto company doing development of something as significant and difficult as making a self-driving car.
They know that they will not be held liable no matter how bad of a job they do - would you drive across a bridge built by bridge engineers hired, managed, and made to work the way software engineers are hired, managed, and made to work in modern companies?
"Cruise 3rd generation self-driving car assembled in Lake Orion, Michigan.
It shows a steering wheel, though the info graphic shows no steering wheel. Maybe the caption should read "2nd generation".
Seriously though. Please call me when that happens. I really, really want to not have to drive anymore. I don't care what the price tag is.
Jokes aside, it's still semi-public transportation.
Imagine how much money is spent by car manufacturers now just validating the functionality of "simple" tech like locks and wipers at the testing grounds in northern Sweden and similar. All components of these systems will have to go through the same kinds of tests.
My dash display gets funny whenever it's below -20 in the car - I can only imagine what happens to all these sensors.
How cheap do you think this could be made? What price do you think people (consumers, not taxi operators) are ready to pay for decent autonomy in a car?
This article is very opaque on how mature this is. The vehicles are the 'last mile' and from everything I've read we are a long way from Level 5 mass market maturity. everything else seems to require you to be able to reflexively grab the wheel and use the pedals at any moment if something goes wrong...
Useful article about Toyota's Gill Pratt on realities https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sel...
Or we could all move to SF ... and live inside our cars?
(It's not just about seeing through moisture: it's also about traction, something you can't really use sensors to enhance.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_stability_control#R...
Humans deciding to go continue driving in such conditions is a mistake, leading to more collisions. Perhaps there will be a manual override, like "Unsafe conditions, voice password and waiver required to continue in manual mode; you might die or kill someone else."
Or take a page from the internet playbook: Destroy the car and re-send from the origin.
To the poster who had a throwaway and identified themselves as an employee of Cruise, if the environment you work in is as toxic as you claim, your best bet, right now, is to leave.
Don't stay a minute longer, as this kind of thing has a way of biting those who stay in the rear sooner rather than later.
Tesla is going about making electric cars sexy.
So you won't find me interested even if it sings too.
Never-the-less, for all the folks the that don't mind ugly cars it's good to have competition to gather all the data to prove that driverless cars are safer.
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.
I'm sure GM is getting a healthy discount off retail from Velodyne, but production-ready lidar is still eye-wateringly expensive by OEM standards. Some solid-state lidar units (Quanergy) out there in the hundreds of dollars (and one from Velodyne in the works for 2018 release), but the fact that Cruise is still using spinning Velodyne units suggests to me that solid-state lidar needs a few more generations to come up to par.
Which is why gov'ts need to ban ICE sooner rather than later, to save summers and stave off species suicide.
Just like cars that we drive, self driving cars enable sprawl. Sprawl will never be environmentally sustainable. We need cities that you move through by foot, bike, and public transit.
I will say that self-driving cars help a bit in getting people to bike, though. The biggest barrier to biking in San Francisco is people's fear of getting killed by cars (the SF Bike Coalition has done surveys on this). Self-driving cars should pose less of a risk to cyclists - they don't run red lights or speed, etc.
Another potential benefit would be reducing the need for parking. The biggest obstacle to physically separated bike lanes is the space they take up - typically that requires removing parking. If self-driving taxis are super cheap, that should lead to less car ownership, and possibly less demand for parking.
That's all very speculative though.
A great commuter rail system is what allows people who work in the world's premiere cities to live in strip-mall exurbs and take the train to work.
I live in Washington, DC. Metro is what allows huge numbers of people to live in sprawling suburbs instead of in the city. Yes, some drive, but traffic is rough and would be unbearable without Metro. Fewer people would be able to live outside the dense city center.
A massive proportion of the DC area population lives in the burbs, drives to a cheap/nearby parking garage at a transit center, and then takes mass transit into the city to work.
This lifestyle would be impossible without mass transit.
What makes you think that density/economic output are the main factors in how much public transit actually gets built?
EDIT: I actually love public transit, but I just don't see any evidence that it does anything but encourage sprawl just like cars do. Also, public mass transit's environmental advantage over cars will vanish with electrification. What public transit does do extremely well is get people from A to B with high throughput. That by itself is highly valuable in any major city.
It will make the politics of building mid-rise housing without extensive, expensive underground parking space a lot more politically palatable in American cities. The same is true of replacing parking with pedestrian and bike infrastructure. And that says nothing about the safety benefits that will make cycling and walking a lot more pleasant and accessible in a lot of the US. (There are no technical barriers to building mid-rise urban housing without parking and replacing parking with high-quality pedestrian and bike infrastructure in the US today, but the politics are very difficult as drivers treat free/cheap access to city-owned street space as a right)
Plus, urbanites paying the marginal per-mile cost of a robotaxi trip, as opposed to buying a car as a huge sunk cost and then trying to get the maximum use from it, means that people will consider the car-versus-transit-versus-bike economics a lot more often, rather than buying a car and becoming someone who drives everywhere.
In cities and dense inner suburbs, parking is a limiting factor to higher density; typically every parking spot is taken, and then some.
Also, automatic driving could greatly improve the cost and convenience of public (or private fleet) transit.
And yet https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/opinion/cities-suburbs-ho...
"Despite the hype around “micro-apartments” and other innovations intended to cram more people into less room, many Americans still want space. They want to live in detached suburban homes, or in an apartment with enough square footage and access to outdoor space that it feels like one. Two-thirds of people born since 1997, including those who live in cities, want to live in single-family suburban homes, according to a 2015 survey, but the costs make this aspiration prohibitively expensive in most urban centers."
We actually did decent low density non-sprawl until after WWII. Find it at the center of any city that existing before that (and wasn't bulldozed).
Assuming clean, renewable energy powers all electric mobility, why not? I do not want to live in a city/urban area, and I will pay more not to.
EDIT: @InitialLastName
Sorry, HN throttling kicked in, can't reply to your reply so I'm putting this here.
If I have a well for water, septic for sewage, solar on my roof, and a gravel road to town, what's the problem? I understand its super expensive for cities to deliver utilities and services across sprawl, but if I'm not asking for those services and utilities to be provided, it should be a non-issue.
If anything, sprawl will make service and utility delivery more efficient, as we'll have no other choice for those who choose that lifestyle.
Have a look at the graph of the cost of delivering utilities. This isn't about environmental sustainability as much as long-term economic sustainability.
When towns sprawl, utilities with costs that scale with distance cost more per person.
That StrongTowns blog graph is intentionally misleading. It's not a cost of delivering utilities, it's a cost of utilities based on tax revenue a given parcel generates. It's an attempt to make cities "for profit".
Obviously, anywhere significant amounts of people live is going to come up "red", because we don't tax people the same rate we tax corporate offices, and because people use more resources there (most people live / cook / shower / sleep / etc at home, not in their cubicle).
That doesn't make it less worth that cost though (those downtown regions are only able to be "green" because there's lots of red around them). And it doesn't really have to do with sprawl. (The cost does rise with distance, but in mostly trivial ways. And those costs spiral backward again too -- 5,000 feet of new powerline in suburbia is far cheaper than 500 feet of new powerline in Manhattan, for instance).
> This isn't about environmental sustainability as much as long-term economic sustainability.
If that's the argument, then cities are almost entirely ruled out already. Cities aren't even economically sustainable for their current residents today, sprawl is the only thing preventing cities current economic issues from becoming even worse.
Sprawl is the only reason the majority of regular folks have any housing to sleep in at all.
When factored in with total cost of living are these cities cheaper or more expensive? I can think of plenty of dense efficient cities that are more expensive than cities with sprawl.
* traffic problems will be significantly reduced * you won't need traffic lights like they exist today * the vehicles can be reduced in size (double occupancy perhaps); a family can just order a couple cars and have communication between them * streets can be reduced to fewer lanes; possibly one-way because the vehicles can navigate the best route in any case
A self-driving car increases the radius of effect of things like mass transit stations. That can be a useful intermediate step before another transit stop gets built.
Don't forget to read the fine print about the driver actually needing to keep their hands on the wheel and ready to correct the car should it do anything improper. You bear full responsibility for anything the car does. And have fun!
And the court looked at it and said "yep, no negligence here. Software has no standards. There are no licensed engineers to hire. Go ahead and do whatever the hell you want, even if it kills people you're fine." No company is going to take the millions of dollars worth of precautions necessary to prevent things like that.
Edit to add: Also, if the intent was to reveal what was deleted, I would lean on the side of respecting someone's right to retract what they said. We've all said something that we regret saying. If you think there's something untoward going on, you can contact the HN mods via the Contact link in the footer.
For sure, there is still a lot of work to be done before we can launch a full L4/L5 vehicle, but I would say with high confidence our platform is ahead of most other players in the industry, and I'm confident that we will be one of the first companies to launch AVs at scale.
FWIW, Glassdoor seems to agree with me: https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-Cruise-EI_IE97...
> Kyle is easily the most intelligent, hard working, and reasonable CEO I have worked for.
Couldn't you be in a different management hierarchy to this purported employee?
Yes, it's entirely possible that the commenter is (or was) an employee in a department other than engineering. We all report to CEO eventually though, so I don't think that would result in a significantly different experience.
Also, that sounds terrible. What's keeping you (or anyone else) there?
Funniest thing is they still use wiring harnesses. 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.
Embed channels in the unibody. Seal power+digital rails in the channels and provide replaceable hubs at joints (which avoids some problems with CAN transceiver issues, and simplifies maintenance). Use plugs that can be sealed in place to connect sensors. The only wires, if any are needed, are between the sensor and a point on the frame, which might be a few centimeters apart.
Unibodies already are subject to replacement upon severe damage and the replaced part would include the data rails. Attached sensors could be disconnected and rewired or replaced. Fiber would be just as vulnerable to crash and transceivers would probably cost more, and it certainly wouldn't be less complex, other than perhaps EMI.
A lot of modern car design is a result of balancing complexity against maintenance cost. A lot of these factors will go away in a driverless electic world.
Yup. Total click bait.
That's the last paragraph. It makes me think the writer views it as a technical problem - they need a human as a backup. But, there's not enough context, so I could be misreading it.
Autonomous vehicles exist since quite a while now...
An Italian university tested an autonomous vehicle from Italy to China in 2010: the car was independent the 90% of the time, and semi-autonomous in case of lack of maps or other special conditions: https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-softwa...