The Digital Transformation of Cars Is Just Beginning

The Great Button Purge is continuing unchecked. In the future we will ask ourselves how we could be so foolish to exchange the wonderful tactility of buttons merely to have slightly cleaner and infinitely more frustrating cockpits. Other issues with computers in your car include annoying beeping noises and every once in a while the car thinks it knows how to drive better than you. (i'm not really being fair, without ABS i'd probably be toast by now)

Hope I'm staying on topic. I hate to see such a huge influx of cars with touchscreen controls on the infotainment only. This should be banned and heavily regulated, nothing good can come out of it, same as we did with the phones while driving. Tesla is major example for this, such a bad design direction.

It wasn&#x27;t until the 1980s that a passenger side door mirror became mandatory. I think that these will be replaced with camera. A camera is cheaper than a car mirror at this point. It&#x27;ll make the car slightly more aerodynamic.<p>Eventually a car maker will produce an economy car without a rear window. Glass is expensive. People just end up using the camera system anyway. It&#x27;ll do better in a roll-over test, without the rear glass.

I’d like to hear more about the situation with integration.<p>Like you know if you take a look at the innards of a 80s pc (say 286) it will be chock full of discrete ICs. Caches, bus controllers. Now its just a handful of chips plus tons of firmware.<p>I find it strange that the number of features and sensors would so directly drive the number of semis. Maybe at first, but in the end a car will be a ”SoC” (or few) like everything else.<p>What am I missing?

Wow this is fascinating. Some random thoughts popped into my head.<p>- Would this drive up the cost of these vehicles?<p>- Is there likely to be a fundamental change in the way that these components are sourced, a move away from just in time?<p>- Is this mirrored in other industries?

I spend a good 10 mins staring at the figure just before the header &quot;Electrification of Vehicles&quot; (I wish the author had numbered his figures properly). I still don&#x27;t really understand what this chart means or says. Can anyone explain?

I&#x27;d day the &quot;irrelevance of cars&quot; as most will work from home (and many will have no work to go to) is just beginning...<p>Actually it&#x27;s already on going, with less interest in car ownership in the 21st century, the advent of Uber and similar services, and renewed interest in modern public transportation, at least from countries that progress to the future (like China, India, and so on), not from countries that cling to the past and let their infrastructure deteriorate (US but also common in Europe, where several countries are basically shells of their 19th&#x2F;20th century self, infrastructure, geo-politically, and demographics wise).

I&#x27;ll keep my dumb car thanks