alt Hacker News> Turns out that actual cars don’t have individual cables. Instead they have these big “looms”, which bundle many cables from a nearby area into a single harness. This is the reason why I could not find the individual cable earlier. They simply don’t manufacture it.
Typical setup for cars (and lawn mowers). As a software guy my first instinct is, computing power is cheap enough, seems like a CAT5-like thing running between all components would do it. Speaking as a software guy - meaning I'm probably missing a lot of the big picture. On the other hand, it's a lot easier to safety-check a mechanical lockout that physically opens a circuit, than something running on software.
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Cars are moving towards something like that, mostly because copper is expensive and there are miles and miles of it in even a basic car these days
I read somewhere that the reason they don't typically use IT networking cables / tech is because normal IT infrastructure is a lot less strict with things like packet loss. It's actually not a huge deal to drop packets here and there, especially if any given component is at capacity. But in a car, some devices are super chatty and you can't be dropping packets much at all.
That said, I'm sure there's gotta be a better way to solve it with less copper. And I think they did something like that with CyberTruck.