Yahoo Finance After a Pause, Comma.ai Delivers a Driver-Assist System That Rivals Super Cruise and Autopilot
When George Hotz first shook the foundation of a massive global industry, he was only 17 years old. His feat: He was the first person to unlock an iPhone, thereby enabling its use across wireless networks other than AT&T.
Roughly a decade later, Hotz is on the verge of upending another industry.
First drawn to self-driving technology after conversations with Elon Musk about potential work on Tesla’s Autopilot, Hotz instead chose to challenge the auto industry by forging his own path. The results of his efforts became apparent last week when his startup, Comma.ai, showcased the latest iteration of an advanced driver-assist system unlike anything else on the road.
Without the help or oversight of traditional automakers or Silicon Valley’s mightiest tech companies, Hotz and his team, along with an enthusiast community of coders, have spurred development of open-source software that runs that system-allowing motorists to install what amounts to a do-it-yourself driver-assist feature that allows them to remove their hands from the wheel.
Users can download that software, called Openpilot 0.5, for free. But they’ll need Comma.ai’s hardware-essentially, three pieces of equipment, the most important being the phonelike Eon Dashcam DevKit-to make it all work. Once installed in a car by a customer, Openpilot 0.5 handles steering, braking, and acceleration.
“If you can mount a GoPro and plug in a wire, you can do this,” Hotz said.
As with the comparable Super Cruise system developed by General Motors or Tesla’s Autopilot, human drivers must keep their eyes on the road when using Openpilot, and they remain ultimately responsible for all driving operations. This is a driver-assist feature, not a self-driving vehicle.
The novel difference between Comma.ai’s tech and the other two: Motorists don’t need to buy a car in the upper-five-figure range to access this technology. Right now, Super Cruise is only available on the Cadillac CT6 Premium, which starts at $84,295. By contrast, Openpilot is compatible with almost all new Toyota and Honda models. It could be used on approximately six million vehicles on the road today, according to Hotz.
For instance, a car buyer could purchase a base Honda Civic for $19,835, separately buy the hardware from Comma.ai for roughly $1000, download the free Openpilot 0.5 software, and cobble together a driving-assist feature comparable to the most advanced systems on the market, at a fraction of the cost.
At a time when automakers and other tech developers talk about “democratizing” safety through automated technology-that is, spreading such features beyond luxury vehicles to more affordable models-Comma.ai may be the first to actually accomplish that.
But How Well Does It Work?
Last week, Hotz and I drove from his home in southwest San Francisco in a 2016 Honda Civic Touring. The Eon Dashcam DevKit was affixed to its windshield. Once we got beyond the traffic lights of his neighborhood and onto I-280, a white steering-wheel icon appeared on the Eon’s screen, indicating the system was enabled.
I switched on the system by pressing the same “set” button used to activate cruise control, and we began an uneventful ride of a few dozen miles along the highway south of the city with the car automatically accelerating, braking, and steering. Control was polished and smooth. Both acceleration and braking felt gentle and refined, and the lane-keeping function kept the vehicle firmly in the center of the lane, with no ping-ponging between lane stripes. The system uses radar units already installed in the cars for sensing.
There are some caveats. For the purpose of my test drive, Hotz geofenced the areas in which the Openpilot software would work. When he took my place in the driver’s seat on the return trip to San Francisco, he removed the geofence and enabled Openpilot on more complex, urban roads.
Hotz has a firm understanding of the shortcomings and nuances of the current state of the system, which are magnified in city driving. But one wonders exactly how well versed other users will need to be to safely utilize Openpilot, and how clearly they will understand its operational limits.
With Super Cruise, by contrast, General Motors addresses such quandaries by strictly limiting the areas where the system can be activated to certain premapped highways.
As with manufacturers’ systems, it was easy to relax and feel complacent on our drive. Hotz cautioned against that overconfidence, however.
“There are a lot of consumer surveys about how the public doesn’t have much trust in self-driving technology, but the problem isn’t that there’s too little trust,” he said. “There’s too much trust.”
Openpilot has a disengagement rate-the rate at which system errors or failures require human takeover-of about one per hour, Hotz estimated, although our hour-long drive south of San Francisco would prove flawless. It’s the first time I can remember a chief executive officer volunteering such information; his transparency stands in contrast to executives at GM and Tesla, who declined comment when asked this week to share their disengagement rates.
Hotz noted that the disengagement rate is improving as more users join the open-sourcing community and label data related to their drives. But he emphasized again that this is a driver-assist feature in which humans remain responsible for operations. That’s one reason why the latest version of Openpilot contains driver monitoring, done from a camera in the mounted Dashcam DevKit, that watches drivers and reminds them to keep their heads pointed toward the road. After two seconds of looking away from the road, drivers get a visual warning on the Eon, and an audible one sounds after four seconds of inattention. At six seconds, the system turns off and no longer accelerates.
Driver monitoring has taken on new urgency in recent months, Hotz said. The National Transportation Safety Board excoriated Tesla’s lack of adequate monitoring in its report from an investigation of a fatal May 2016 crash in Florida involving Autopilot. More recently, the role of driver inattention in the deadly Uber crash in Arizona earlier this year highlighted the urgency for Openpilot to include driver monitoring.
Regulators Could Ruffle Plans
If there’s an eagerness for Comma.ai to be proactive with driver monitoring, it may stem from the company’s previous attempt to launch an advanced driving-assist feature. In late 2016, Hotz announced he would sell Comma One, a similar aftermarket kit that enabled similar driver-assist features.
But that unveiling brought a rebuke from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which sent a letter in October 2016 warning that government officials were “concerned that your product would put the safety of your customers and other road users at risk. We strongly encourage you to delay selling or deploying your product on the public roadways unless and until you can ensure it is safe.”
In the days that followed, Hotz abandoned his plans to sell Comma One directly. Instead, he embarked on a regulatory workaround: this current path of selling just the hardware and open-sourcing the code behind it, meaning it is available for free. He says often, “We are not selling a consumer product.”
It remains to be seen whether NHTSA officials will buy into any of this or whether they’ll again scrutinize Comma.ai. Hotz suggested that current federal leadership is more amenable to innovation. But speaking during the Automated Vehicles Symposium in San Francisco last week-a day before Openpilot 0.5 was released-NHTSA deputy administrator Heidi King alluded to the earlier scrap with the company.
“NHTSA continues to be responsible for all motor vehicles and motor vehicle equipment,” she said. “We will continue to use our authority when needed, as we did recently.”
The Road Ahead
Car enthusiasts often like to tinker to enhance their driving experience. Hotz and his company bring the same approach to promoting tools that allow motorists to install a do-it-yourself driving-assist feature. Whether or not that’s a good idea remains largely in the eye of the beholder, or perhaps regulators.
But the company has delivered an impressive driving-assist system with the same capabilities as the most advanced OEM offerings. It has done so not with a massive research-and-development budget, but with 14 employees working out of Hotz’s San Francisco home. Comma.ai is in position to change the way millions of motorists can drive on highways and to do so immediately, at a fraction of the cost of well-funded behemoths.
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By the end of the year, Hotz anticipates adding high-definition maps that will provide greater reliability to the system. Further down the road, he expects to enable Level 3 automated operations-those in which the system bears some responsibility for operations. Then Level 4, which is fully automated driving where the system holds all responsibility. It’s a long way ahead, but then again, he’s already come a long way.
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