June 6, 2016 at 4:51 am Gasoline would be preferable to diesel. And yes PHEV are one of the best concept for a less-consuming-and-polluting car but… Business must go on and we still have a shitload of gas to sell ! June 6, 2016 at 12:19 pm Yes, airliners have been FBW – but only Airbuses are fully fly-by-wire. Boeings are not and it is a major selling point for some clients. Also you are certainly not prepared to have your car serviced with comparable rigor and frequency as airliners are. Heck, many people find it too expensive/annoying to have their oil changed once a year. Now imagine if you had to have you car checked for safety every few months, because if a brake pedal sensor or steering conks out, you are dead. If your gas pedal breaks on today’s car you can still steer and stop the car, so it doesn’t quite compare. In the case of airliners, most have all critical system double-triple redundant, both electrical and hydraulic, often with a non-computerized fallback as the last defense (i.e. the yoke or trim controls drive the hydraulics directly should the computers die for any reason). That’s not going to happen on a car, nobody would pay for that. A fully drive-by-wire car would be an immense boon for the manufacturers – among other things it would completely eliminate 3rdparty garages/service (or reduce them to changing tires) Even today, if there is a problem with the electrics, most garages will shrug and send you over to the dealership, because they simply don’t have access to the required diagnostic tools (or they are so overpriced that it doesn’t make sense for them economically). I am not a-priori against the drive by wire, but not in the current “system”. The manufacturers today are impossible to trust to both not abuse their monopoly of information about how the car works (John Deere even claimed that farmers are not allowed to work on their tractors, because the firmware is copyrighted by them and tried to use DMCA to stop them) and to be sufficiently competent to not actually kill the owner of the car with their buggy software. In the situation where even the manufacturer often doesn’t have a clue what is going on inside of the various modules and control units that they have bought from a 3rdparty supplier, how can I trust the thing with my life? Just look at the serious issues that are being uncovered almost every day in the automotive systems. If someone like Mitsubishi is unable to make their ICE secure enough to not be a stalking tool and an attack vector, BMW’s keyless entry allows thieves to steal the cars with a $20 gadget from eBay, Toyota was causing crashes due to (among other things) buggy software for gas pedal, Jeeps could have brakes locked remotely (!) then why do you think your drive-by-wire car will not have issues like this – and on safety critical systems?