This so reminds me of the discussion about fire from the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.
The challenge of a self driving car is to get it to drive by itself, not to try to make it look good and to solve a whole pile of engineering problems that have had everybody in engineering looking at them since as long as we have the profession.
Making gadgets and making a self driving car require a different mind-set. The first is an exercise in consumer packaging, the second is a serious endeavor in engineering something tremendously difficult from the ground up.
What the vehicle looks like is not important at this stage, what is important is whether it can be done at all with sufficient reliability to let it out of the lab and into the mass market.
When someone seriously suggests to 'reinvent the wheel' it is time to re-focus.
The challenge of a self driving car is to get it to drive by itself, not to try to make it look good and to solve a whole pile of engineering problems that have had everybody in engineering looking at them since as long as we have the profession.
Making gadgets and making a self driving car require a different mind-set. The first is an exercise in consumer packaging, the second is a serious endeavor in engineering something tremendously difficult from the ground up.
What the vehicle looks like is not important at this stage, what is important is whether it can be done at all with sufficient reliability to let it out of the lab and into the mass market.
When someone seriously suggests to 'reinvent the wheel' it is time to re-focus.