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It is my understanding that the long-range vision is to convert the entire North American railroad practice (1.4 million cars and 29,000 locomotives) to this ECP system.  The technology seems fairly easy to comprehend.  Air does the work, but the conventional control function of air is replaced by an electric control function.  So the pneumatic brain of the conventional system (i.e.: the triple valve) is replaced by an electronic brain.  Not so easy to comprehend is the logistics of the mass conversion.Both the cost and the return savings are astoundingly high, but they also accrue in complex variables:  For the cost, the variables are which types of service are converted first, economies of scale in number of cars converted at one time, retrofitting versus new car construction, whether or not cars are equipped with overlay capability for dual system use.  For the return, the variables are fuel savings, wheel savings, brake shoe savings, and savings on brake inspections.   There are also cost savings associated with the safety benefits and reduced cost of crew training.The fundamental drawback inertia in the conversion is that if you apply ECP brakes to one freight car at a cost of $4000, there is no benefit.  If you applied it to 1000 cars, and let those cars circulate as cars do, there would be no measurable benefit unless several or many of those cars happened to end up in one train one time.  So the conversion, which will be gradual, needs to be targeted initially to captive cars in unit train service, and then spread out to cars that frequently run on certain corridors.  And the more cars that are converted or introduced new with ECP, the less need there will be for the overlay capability and its extra cost.
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