I think this whole area is going to have a very interesting future. All the current "car animation" systems rely on various low-tech "tricks" in order to be affordable. They are amazing, but pretty limited. I think that this is about to change. Robotics and the emerging autonomous driving world are advancing computer vision and route planning software at an incredible rate, and it doesn't take a supercomputer to run the resulting algorithms. An O-gauge car with a forward-facing camera capable of driving itself on the roads of a layout is probably possible now, and will soon be trivial. (Think of those "line-following" robot toys that have been around for years). It won't be long before somebody from our tribe retires from Tesla or Uber and uses his or her skills to launch a little company that does self-driving model cars for real.
We shall see..,
