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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

Steer by wire sounds like a disastrous idea to me, especially in a car made with attention to detail of Tesla.

I'm not even sure where to start. It's less reliable, surely it must be (at least without significant investment into QA and redundancy). A physical wheel physically connected to bits turning the wheels, well, the power steering can do, but you can still turn the thing.

Then, it's all software driven. And it can't be air-gapped, because surely the various driver assistance programs need to turn the wheel. But so if the crappy OTA-updated software crashes, I can't steer? Or steering reverts, or who knows what.

Finally, I'm not holding my breath on a new membership option including "you can steer your car again".

I'm no Luddite, I'm keen for what technology can do for us, but some places I don't want it.

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Steer by wire is ok. We had all pedals by wire for ages. Hopefully they won't screw up the implementation again https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agMrewRJTow

Gas not working is usually just inconvenient, brakes have physical failsafe, and steering is more important than both.

Brake by wire has been a standard on many vehicles for at least a decade at this point.

I would guess that steer by wire is a standard off the shelf module. Both Bosch and ZF at the least offer this.

Brake by wire has a physical backup

Usually the critical features are somewhat "air-gapped". For example, I can restart my Model X computer, the screen will turn black 100%, and many key functions still work.

None of the computers that are required to drive the car actually turn off when you reboot the computer that drives the dash/console display.

I lost pneumatic steering during a turn, and it nearly tore my arm off. Not sure most people would be able to drive over a few mph without powered steering.

Hopefully the steer by wire systems are backed by another steer by wire system, so it would be terrible luck if you lost both at the same time.

I think you me under a few mph. You don't need that much assist at highway speed but you need a ton of assist at a dead stop.

What car are you driving that has pneumatic steering?

Also, in my experience driving cars with unassisted steering, it's steering at parking speeds that is difficult, steering at speeds above about 10 mph is fairly easy.

The incident happened in the early 2000s and the car was Buick LeSabre from the 80s. I am no expert, so maybe it was some other steering assist technology, but it definitely wasn't easy to finish the turn without it.

Given that my backup camera lags half the time I use it on my Model Y, I'm also not excited about this. But perhaps they'll have solved the whole real time thing in the process.

Drive-by-wire throttles have been a thing for over a decade, and the only company to epically screw it up was Toyota.

Also Volvo. I'm sure there are others.

https://www.matthewsvolvosite.com/volvos-electronic-throttle...

Yeah look at planes. I'd rather have hydraulics and mechanical controls still in a car. Which is why I drive a primitive POS (Dacia Duster).

Tell me you have zero flight time or aircraft engineering experience without telling me you have zero flight time or aircraft engineering experience. This is no different from Trump claiming he wanted "damn steam" for aircraft carrier catapults despite electromagnetic ones having clear advantages. This isn't 1969 anymore.

I do actually but that's irrelevant. It's an engineering trade-off. In a car, it's a stupid one because its built to a cost profile not a safety profile.

You can't compare a $200m Airbus to a whatever it's going to cost but is being lied about vanity machine kicked out by a vendor with a history of software problems.

Actually the risk profile is probably higher on the damn car.

I think all airbus commercial jets are fly by wire.

Not totally. They have two redundant computers in the control loop. But they worked out this was a shitty idea if there was a failure so there are mechanical and electrical backup systems. Whilst "fly by wire" technically speaking they don't involve a computer in the loop.

I'd still rather have a totally mechanical backup.

>Not totally. They have two redundant computers in the control loop. But they worked out this was a shitty idea if there was a failure so there are mechanical and electrical backup systems. Whilst "fly by wire" technically speaking they don't involve a computer in the loop.

What's the basis for that claim? Even in direct-law, there's still a computer in the path. In aircraft with the BCM, that's still a flight control computer, albeit one that's separate from the primary/secondary flight control computers.

AFAIK BCM is straight servo loop.

They have some mechanical bits. I think you can fly the a320 by modulating the engine thrust and using trim wheels.

The more terrifying thing about airbus is that their philosophy (like teslas) is that the computer is the ultimate decision maker.

Boeing has the philisophy that it is the pilot (with a little caveat for the 737 max mcas thing)

Exactly.

In the case of the Cybertruck you can't modulate shit!

i look forward to the recalls

Luddite is not synonym for technophobe. Sorry to interrupt, I believe it's an important distinction given Luddites' role in industrial society.

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