Note additions [shown in capital letters in quoted material above].
CO switches & their software are insanely expensive but like a Apollo stack, reliability is not cheap....nor easy in production. [A half-day's car production by the smallest provider exceeds ten year's worth of ESS's...]
The failure modes for some of the threats a car faces are predictable & can be engineered around, but not all.
There is no doubt that Detroit has done amazing things in reliability, but we have a long way to go before autonomous vehicles will be viable.
Picking at Nits: some phone switches became computer controlled, starting with the first one in 1965. The nation-wide conversion wasn't complete until the early 1990s.
In the early days of the No 1 ESS total control failure, although unusual, was not rare. Some of it was previously undetected software errors in program control, others were hardware failures.
Even more common were line-control module failures, which tended to knock out several hundread customers, but not nearly the entire office.
I wouldn't have wanted a No 1 ESS control system running my car.
Not until the time division (digital) switches come along did we have true 100% computer controlled end-office switching.
'Expensive' is not a design criteria of those systems.
It is what _unavoidably_ happens when you design for long lifetimes, and very high reliability with minimal maintenance.
It's not that difficult to build hardware with a million-hour MTBF, -if- you allot 4-5 hrs for PM every 200 power-on hours.
Yup. 'Threat avoidance', or 'threat handling', is generally a relatively _easy_ part of the task. Once you've figured out _what_ to do (in broad terms), figuring out -how- do do it is a comparatively simple decision tree. 'Threat _identification_' (and deciding "what to do") is much harder -- especially when something happens that the designers didn't think about. Like for, example, a piece falling off an airplane and landing on the highway. Or a sinkhole opening up.
When the "utterly unexpected", all the pre-planned contingencies go out the window, and it's "what the h*ll do I do _NOW*?" time.
Things that 'were' entirely unacceptable (like swerving/crashing into the car beside you) are suddenly back in consideration, when that 50 ton piece of the mountainside falls onto the road 100 ft in front of you.
Make that 'autonomous vehicles _operating_in_an_uncontrolled_environment_', and I'll agree. There are presently numbers of autonomously operating _passenger-_ _carrying_ systems in production use. A number of airports have 'people- mover' systems that transport passengers between terminals, parking, and other facilities, without any on-board 'staff', for one example.
***** Moderator's Note *****
This is veering (pun intended) away from telecom again.
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