Not even remotely cheap. In the Toyota Prius New Car Features Manual, there are four pages of diagrams showing how this kind of braking works--and that's just the mechanical plumbing. It's very complex and doesn't give a great braking feel. This is, in my opinion, worse than the supercap idea.
AFAIK, the hardware necessary for a blended brake pedal is installed on every AP-capable car - the Bosch iBooster system that is present for AP includes blended braking as a feature.
However, while I've heard there are better implementations than Toyota's blended brake pedal... I can confirm that Toyota's is pretty bad.
The law states that a car must have side mirrors. They might be easily removable after purchase as Elon once suggested. Would help with drag
I don't know about the law change. It makes a lot of sense to use cameras to replace side mirrors. It's about time to update the law to reflect technology improvement. People who tried the camera/screen approach gave high remarks to it.
Ok, but if the law hasn’t changed and won’t be changing by end of year, then MY will in fact have side mirrors regardless of any picture on the Internet. Right?
The exception to this is if other countries are starting to change laws regarding side mirrors, but i haven't read anything in particular saying there is some big international change in rules.
As has been mentioned, there are production cars with only cameras - the Volkswagen XL1 in the European market, the Lexus ES in the Japanese market, and the Audi e-tron in at least the European market are all available with side cameras.
However, the US laws regarding mirrors require that a car have
a driver's side mirror. Not two (unless there isn't a usable interior rear view mirror, as with some trucks and vans, in which case a passenger side mirror is mandated). Granted, leaving the passenger side mirror off was the domain of the most basic of econoboxes (which were generally underpowered enough that you simply weren't passing, and therefore didn't need to see cars on the right mirror) into the early 1990s, but Tesla
could do it and replace it with a camera.
If you really want to go faster than replacing ICE cars on a 1-to-1 basis, build electrified rail. Like China is doing. It's out of the box -- a competent country can have an entire network up and running, and removing cars from the road, well before the first level 5 full self-driving car even exists.
And, it's worth noting that the problem space for automation of rail and rail-like mass transit is much smaller, to the point that there've been successful exhibitions of automated railways as far back as
1924, and successful systems meant for actual transportation as far back as the 1970s. (Note that most of these automated services are rubber-tired for various reasons... which actually
does pull this into being relevant to Tesla. Fundamentally, The Boring Company's Shuttle is just a
very fast and weird people mover (with some shortsighted design) based on Model X hardware.)
And automation is, I think, the key to making mass transit work - maintaining frequent service intervals is critical to make a mass transit service useful (especially if the network is complex enough to need transfers) to avoid the horror stories of 3 hour bus trips to go 20 miles, but you rapidly reach a point where labor costs dwarf everything else if you are maintaining those service intervals, and every system has periods of infrequent at best service because it's not worth paying workers to stay around during those low ridership periods... which makes them lower ridership periods. Automating the thing, you can at least do demand response operation without labor being an issue (and nowadays you could have riders say where they're going to go, and the system has real-time data on where it needs to have cars to optimize travel times).
