I disagree. I think if there's a clean uniform interface in which a device can receive video and make commands it could work out. Consider the fact that no auto maker I've seen, apart from Tesla, has made an infotainment system equivalent to a first generation iPad. I know its trendy to hate on infotainment, but I just want to see a map w/ directions to where I'm going. They're a lost cause in my opinion, and the less they do on the software front, the better.

Automakers gave up on that and now include android and apple car play as a feature. So I imagine they'll eventually give up and outsource things like lane assist, which are considerably more difficult

Autonomy is going to require a lot more than a CAN bus & some video interfaces. The specific sensors matter. The framerates matter. The field of view & mount points matter. The specific compute platform matters -- and it certainly shouldn't run on an Android or iPhone without automotive-rated components, realtime guarantees, etc.

All of these things argue strongly for a wholistic vehicle design rather than an aftermarket afterthought.

That's fair. But I think for their current use case, lane keep assist, they make due with less. They're comfortable in level 2 self driving. For anything above that you're probably right, but I would love to see big auto outsource much of it a company dedicated to self-driving. Specialization is essential in these sensitive fields and automakers already rely on suppliers heavily. Very few can get away with the Apple model and even Apple relies on outside parts.

The funny thing is that w/ any other product we would scoff at fully integrated end to end solution for a product that doesn't exist. No product market fit, no minimum viable product, no incremental products.

Yet they do-the-tesla trick and present the product as fully SDV. Disingenuous to the point of fraud: "here's a car in public traffic, with nobody at the wheel, nudge nudge [small print: it's level 2 and you get to clean up all those nasty pieces, nothing to do with us at all, you're only supposed to run it in tightly controlled, isolated private environment]"

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.

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.

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.