> you must remove _everything_ that might introduce unexpected variance
I'm not sure that follows. Cars that communicate can accelerate and brake together even in unexpected situations.
I'm not sure that follows. Cars that communicate can accelerate and brake together even in unexpected situations.
You need the space because of variations in cars; some have better brakes than others, some may be heavier so need more time to slow down, others may be on wetter patch of road, etc.
And one car may not even get the signal, so only slows down when it observes the vehicle ahead of it doing, an observation that needs time.
Or a car starts accelerating as the one in front just stalls.
It may all be better than human reaction times, but for robustness, which is really very necessary, you're going to get the same dynamics.
And this all assumes only good actors; somewhat optimistic in my view.
This isn't entirely true, connected vehicles would still have some delay due to radio propagation time, but it's ns per vehicle instead of hundreds of milliseconds. Additionally, you can entirely compensate for it in ways you really can't with humans.
A horde of cars where 100% of them consistently operate in a failure-free state and have comms that can't be hampered by the environment - that group could maybe do this.