[sah2ed]

> By the way, recent developments indicate that Apple is back to building an electric self-driving car instead of a self-driving platform.

This is the correct approach, yet a lot of people still haven’t internalized this subtle distinction.

For a self-driving platform to deliver on the promise of being more reliable than a human driver, it has to constantly monitor two environments: its internal environment and its external environment, but most discussions dwell on the external.

External environment failure in the worst case scenario can lead to loss of life. OTOH, internal environment failure can lead to internal inconsistency and in the worst case, a machine shutdown; but because cars share the road with other road users, a sudden failure in one car can lead to multiple car accidents and in a worst case scenario, several lives lost. In a way, the failure outcomes are identical.

An electric car is far less complex than an ICE car meaning there are fewer moving parts and subsystems whose state needs to be kept track of constantly. This is where electric drivetrains hold a lot of promise: a low complexity machine can be made more reliable at a lower cost than a high complexity machine.