Most of the motors in vehicles are simple DC motors, not servo motors. But what have the motors and ECU's to do with "Drive by wire"?? I can assure you, your car is not drive by wire, at the very most it might have an electric throttle system (unless you own an Infiniti Q50, in which case you will have recieved an appointment to have the steer by wire replaced with a mechanical solution). Brake by wire and steer by wire aren't on any commercially sold vehicle I know of.
Most of the smaller ECU's are just to reduce wiring and complexity. It's simpler to send commands via CAN or LIN to a door and then break it out into discrete i/o than to have a huge bunch or discrete wires going through the door hinge.
McBryce.
Yeah, except the shift towards this mentality actually helps ensure that engineers with no fucking sense stay employed, and their shit design work gets to production unvetted. You've heard me rant about the moronic implementation of Keyless Entry on my Rav4; where you have to wait 5 seconds to open the doors because the motor pulse is sent
after the door chime completes playing.
4 times.
Here's
another:We've had electric windows for over half a century now; in all that time, they've
all worked the same way (at least in North America): The driver's controls are the master controls, and they
always have control over all the windows in the car, even when you lock out the non-driver windows to prevent them being played with by kids and assholes. Except when they don't: On our Rav4, the lockout
also disables driver's control of those windows... meaning that if they're locked, he has to first deal with the natural "something doesn't work"
momentary confusion, then divert attention from driving to find the lock and deactivate it.
Another bit of stupidity: The seat-belt bitchamatron beeping takes precedence over
all other auditory notification, including essential driver information like the turn-signal tick-tick and
even the collision-avoidance emergency klaxon. Just plain horrible design from
engineers who evidently have no knowledge of the history and evolution of the modern automobile, compounded by evidently
zero usability testing on features prior to production.This drive towards "just let the computer handle it" design ethos allows bad design to get through to production, and it also props up incompetent designers (be they engineers or committees) who should have gotten the axe long before they get to a point of designing actual automobiles for the largest manufacturer on the planet.
mnem