[chii]

or, imagine if there's standard interfaces between the motors/control system and the "brains" of self driving.

Like how CDs and peripherals don't all need to come from the same manufacturer ('cept apple's!), because there's an industry standard for interoperability.

[Miraste]

Apple music peripherals are a great example of what I'm talking about. They don't use bluetooth because W1 chips (their integrated solution) blow bluetooth out of the water. Bluetooth can still exist in other devices because people don't need low latency and high bitrates, but they definitely need their cars not to crash because a standard causes hardware and software from different vendors to run into interoperability quirks. There's no agreement on the best hardware or even the type of hardware for self-driving, so there will be a lot of those quirks.

[Piskvorrr]

The mistake seems to be "there's a standard [and it Works more than 80/20]." There are multiple to choose from, and in versions, and each has revisions, and now Foo v2.1 doesn't want to work with Foo 2.0, except on even Mondays, and don't get me started on Foo 3.x with Bar 1.5.x!

You're handwaving away all the inherent complexity, but shoveling it off into a box labeled "standardization" doesn't make it go away.

In other words, the interoperability is very much "try to swap these components, if they work, yay, if not, try swapping them for something else until you get a combination that works." And that's for non-critical components.