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Comment by karmakaze | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking why not make cars like cars, not smartphones. I hate when a car after a number of years is still perfect except for the extra bells and whistles.

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Well there's a lot of safety features that require semiconductor components. Back up cameras, collision warning, lane assist, brake assist, tire pressure warning, etc. Humans are bad drivers.

we dont need half of that stuff. backup cam is fine (because of the stupid b pillars now) , tire pressure warning is probably cheap enough and not going to be hard to fab at more open foundaries but lane assist and brake assist. naw, fucking drive your car . plus all that self driving stuff makes it easier for cars to be totalled and bring repairs up because of all the sensors.

The pillars are there to save lives during a crash.

The lane assist and brake assist - along with adaptive cruise control - are great systems that also increase safety, if used properly. The difference in fatigue alone that these systems contrubute to is (anecdotally from my experience) night and day.

I believe that the improved safety is worth the increasing complexity of maintenance.

Taking this further. Statistically I might be better off with full autonomous as soon as available, but I wouldn't feel as bad if I crashed myself vs dying while letting the ML data do it's thing. If harm came to others, I'd still be the one who chose to buy/use it and only technically free. At some point I will change my opinion but it will have to be many many times better than humans.

JIT manufacturing predates smartphones by a good decade or two.

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