Many modern cars are moving to steer by wire. Serious question, why wouldn’t you trust your life to that when you very likely already do for acceleration and possibly for braking (depending on your vehicle).
why wouldn’t you trust your life to that when you very likely already do for acceleration and possibly for braking
I, for one, don’t particularly trust those things either! Frankly, I intend to keep driving my (apparently non-modern) '90s and 2000s cars indefinitely because – as a software engineer, a.k.a. the opposite of a luddite – I do not accept having life-safety-critical equipment depending on closed-source software I can’t properly control.
If you’ve ever flown you’ve depended on fly by wire systems to keep you safe and I personally don’t see systems like this for land vehicles to be necessarily any less safe inheritanly. The main issues with all these things that I see is that auto manufacturers seem to be raking increasingly cavalier attitudes to vehicle safety and reliability these days in an effort to squeeze ever more profits.
Steer by wire in cars has neither the redundancy nor the oversight/certification that the system in planes does. But more importantly is actually a better system for a car? Is there something that mechanical power assisted steering can’t do that would warrant the need for steer by wire?
If you’ve ever flown you’ve depended on fly by wire systems to keep you safe
If I’m flying it means I’ve already decided to put my trust in a pilot and it’s up to him to manage the risk of systems failures, not me. It’s an entirely different thing.
Now, if I were piloting a small plane myself, then it would be comparable – but I’d probably want to have mechanical linkages between the yoke and the control surfaces in that case, too!
I’ve seen non-steer by wire cars in the ditch because the steering failed. The failure modes for software is different, but things like tie rod ends still break, and the older car the more likely that type of thing is to happen.
Steer-by-wire cars would still have tie-rod ends etc., though. In other words, they have all the same failure modes as purely mechanical steering, plus additional ones introduced by the servos and computers.
And sure, maintenance on old cars is a thing, but every car gets old eventually so there’s not a real difference there.
Your qualification as a SE does not save you from the stupidity of your position. It’s quite likely that you are unqualified and should avoid thinking you are qualified to do or understand Automotive SE. Just because its not open source does not mean it is inherently bad or unsafe, not to mention the evangelical attitude towards FOSS you clearly have that is clouding the everliving fuck out of your judgement.
An ad-hominem fallacy? Really, is that all you’ve got? Pathetic.
It’s not as if that’s the only reason I reject “modern” computerized cars. I also don’t want it to spy on me, have a shitty touchscreen interface instead of no-look physical buttons, override my inputs because it thinks it can drive better than I can (or more likely, because some sensor spuriously detected an obstacle that wasn’t there), etc.
In my case, my personal car is still old school or “analog” in those areas. I think that in the case of new cars, manufacturers make so many different models that I can’t trust they’ve put the time into debugging and failure-proofing their software. Even the most reliable car brands have occasional hardware recalls, and software glitches in their media systems are fairly common. I’ll need to do more research about what failsafes they have in place, but I’d feel more confident with a mechanical linkage than software
Many modern cars are moving to steer by wire. Serious question, why wouldn’t you trust your life to that when you very likely already do for acceleration and possibly for braking (depending on your vehicle).
I, for one, don’t particularly trust those things either! Frankly, I intend to keep driving my (apparently non-modern) '90s and 2000s cars indefinitely because – as a software engineer, a.k.a. the opposite of a luddite – I do not accept having life-safety-critical equipment depending on closed-source software I can’t properly control.
If you’ve ever flown you’ve depended on fly by wire systems to keep you safe and I personally don’t see systems like this for land vehicles to be necessarily any less safe inheritanly. The main issues with all these things that I see is that auto manufacturers seem to be raking increasingly cavalier attitudes to vehicle safety and reliability these days in an effort to squeeze ever more profits.
Steer by wire in cars has neither the redundancy nor the oversight/certification that the system in planes does. But more importantly is actually a better system for a car? Is there something that mechanical power assisted steering can’t do that would warrant the need for steer by wire?
If I’m flying it means I’ve already decided to put my trust in a pilot and it’s up to him to manage the risk of systems failures, not me. It’s an entirely different thing.
Now, if I were piloting a small plane myself, then it would be comparable – but I’d probably want to have mechanical linkages between the yoke and the control surfaces in that case, too!
I’ve seen non-steer by wire cars in the ditch because the steering failed. The failure modes for software is different, but things like tie rod ends still break, and the older car the more likely that type of thing is to happen.
Steer-by-wire cars would still have tie-rod ends etc., though. In other words, they have all the same failure modes as purely mechanical steering, plus additional ones introduced by the servos and computers.
And sure, maintenance on old cars is a thing, but every car gets old eventually so there’s not a real difference there.
Your qualification as a SE does not save you from the stupidity of your position. It’s quite likely that you are unqualified and should avoid thinking you are qualified to do or understand Automotive SE. Just because its not open source does not mean it is inherently bad or unsafe, not to mention the evangelical attitude towards FOSS you clearly have that is clouding the everliving fuck out of your judgement.
In my case, my personal car is still old school or “analog” in those areas. I think that in the case of new cars, manufacturers make so many different models that I can’t trust they’ve put the time into debugging and failure-proofing their software. Even the most reliable car brands have occasional hardware recalls, and software glitches in their media systems are fairly common. I’ll need to do more research about what failsafes they have in place, but I’d feel more confident with a mechanical linkage than software