this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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The argument for drive-by-wire in personal automobiles is basically that it's safe enough for airplanes, so it should be safe enough for cars.
I mostly buy that. But there's a glaring omission in the reasoning.
In airplanes, there's a full incident investigation for EVERYTHING that goes wrong. Even near misses. It's an industry that (mostly lol boeing) has a history of prioritizing safety. Even at its worst, the safety standards the airline industry and air transportation engineering are orders magnitude more strict than those of the automotive industry and road engineering.
In real terms, automobile incidents should be taken just as seriously. Even near misses should have reporting and analysis. Crashes should absolutely have full investigations. Nearly all automobile deaths are completely avoidable through better engineering of the road systems and cars, but there is mostly no serious culture of safety among automobiles. We chose carnage and have been so immured by it that we don't even think it's weird. We don't think it's weird that essentially everyone, at least in the US, knows someone who died or was seriously injured in a car accident.
So yeah, we should have drive-by-wire. But it should also include other aspects of that safety culture as part of the deal. "Black box" equivalents, for example, and the accompanying post-accident review process that comes with it. A process that focuses not on establishing liability, but preventing future incidents, because establishing liability is mostly a thought-killer when it comes to safety.
...of course, if we actually took road safety that seriously it'd be devastation to the entire car industrial complex. Because much of that industry is focused on design patterns that, in fact, cannot be done safely or sustainably.
Planes also don't evolve in an environment where most people only marginally care about the rules, where a significant minority is composed of unpredictable maniacs, etc. All in all I think it's more hostile for cars.
Sounds like a compelling argument for why we need better safety standards for cars and traffic engineering.
or just sensible rules on letting people purchase vehicles appropriate for all the driving public. overweight lifted monster shitwagons aren't doing anyone favors.
every time I see a truck with a 4' hood line or a 21" touch screen in place of actual controls, I wonder when we're going to see another Nader, someone to strike out at the manufacturers for pushing shit that is unsafe at any speed.
Okay, so understanding that Boeing has been shipping airliners that boing instead of fly or have some bolts missing...
My dad was a frustratingly retired aerospace engineer because there was this period of the 90s where we actually did shrink the defense industry until 9/11 and the contractors started figuring out exactly how to "bribe" people. And one of his side complaints is that any aerospace engineer is probably actually good at being a general-purpose mechanical engineer, except that they've generally made the hard stuff actually safe earlier along, but nobody will hire them. His example being fully-automated-digital-engine-controls and fly-by-wire and having three redundant chains.
So, in the aftermath of the whole Toyota throttle-by-wire thing that really didn't go a whole lot of useful ways, I decided to check out his observation and I did some googling to discover a page where some big company was advertising to the auto industry at large their throttle controllers. And they talk about how they were built with "aerospace technologies" to be reliable and safe. And, looking farther along, it seems like that was not actually three redundant chains, just three threads of execution on the same processor.
Oh yeah, and generally any airplane that does have fly-by-wire and FADEC there is going to always be a set of reversion modes and people have to know about them. Obviously some aspects of this are far stricter because a car can just pull over to the side of the road... but also it needs to do that safely. Witness poor Anton Yelchin dying ignominiously because of the digital gear shifter thing on his Jeep.
But, yeah, the underlying problem is that the cultural expectation is to make cars that will go most places containing capabilities that a vehicle might never actually use in its entire service life and require the minimum amount of knowledge and basically zero knowledge above the collective cultural understanding of a car that's only mildly changed since a fully-mechanically-linked control system.
I just got done swapping the electric power steering rack in my golf and let me tell you, it was nice to have a mechanical linkage when the old one died. It was also ludicrously expensive for just the part and would have been even more if I couldn't swap it myself. It's basically a sealed unit with no obvious way to service it. Some of this stuff is a trade of in ownership costs, and this wasn't even full drive by wire.
But why have drive by wire? Like you touched on, planes have orders of magnitude more testing, redundancy, and need. Not to mention maintenance
Is there a reason cars need it? Powered steering seems to be pretty effective with a better failure mode