[HN Gopher] Comma.ai, self-driving cars and indefinite optimism
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Comma.ai, self-driving cars and indefinite optimism
Author : bko
Score : 97 points
Date : 2021-02-16 12:08 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mleverything.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mleverything.substack.com)
| Traster wrote:
| Ok first,I'm impressed someone is monetising their HN comments.
| But this entire argument is ridiculous, Comma AI's transparency
| isn't a positive compared to traditional car companies.
| Traditional car companies aren't transparent because the
| expectations of a customer is "I buy the product and it works".
| Transparency isn't a substitute for well designed and tested
| products. Comma AI has a massive advantage over car companies-
| they have no intention of following industry standard design
| procedures to ensure they don't kill people- instead they sell
| their software with a sticker saying "if you kill someone you
| don't know us".
|
| I won't be derisive as this author claims I would be, I'll be
| serious. I've worked on autonomous driving solutions with
| traditional car companies, they move slower because BMW means
| something and they know it'll mean death if they fuck up. Comma
| AI haven't learned from the industry they're trying to replace.
| This is the continual edge that Silicon Valley has over the rest
| of the world - they're happy to just use legal arbitrage to gain
| an advantage and then pivot once their advantage is entrenched.
| It's thus ridiculous "how were we supposed to know this would
| happen" excuse that's trotted out all the time that's absolute
| self serving bullshit.
| chollida1 wrote:
| What is comma.ai's business model here?
|
| I mean whose auto insurance(both collision and more importantly
| liability) has a clause that lets anyone hook up a random after
| market self driving toolkit to their car.
|
| Who has liability once you start using their solution?
|
| I'm sure comma.ai will have a clause that their solution is only
| for fun and you can't blame them if their self driving solution
| drives your car into a bus full of orphans.
|
| So what's the point of what they are selling if you can't
| actually use it?
|
| Or put another way, a self driving, or even driving assist add on
| only has value if the vendor absorbs all liability when using
| their system.
| bko wrote:
| As a slight tangent Hotz has joked (?) that his real business
| will be to provide auto insurance to his drivers since he's
| confident that they'll be safer drivers. He'd basically pick
| off the best drivers and he has more data than anyone about
| what constitutes a safe driver.
|
| He makes this interesting observation that essentially all good
| drivers are alike; each bad driver is bad in his own way.
|
| It's an interesting insight and great for self driving since
| the "good" drivers would be clustered while the "bad" drivers
| would essentially be noise.
| rtx wrote:
| Vision guided missiles are hot right now.
| stevenhubertron wrote:
| Bingo. Liability is a huge risk here and they are using their
| "customers" as alpha testers that are playing Russian roulette
| with their lives and those around them. I want Comma to succeed
| but not by shipping alpha-products to the general public that
| doesn't understand the risks.
| sodality2 wrote:
| Wait, they're shipping it already? Wtf, all I did was look at
| their codebase and I assumed they were just making some news
| about it. Distributing code and shipping a product are very
| different, and I'll be surprised if nothing bad comes out of
| it soon.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Comma thinks they are ready because it's essentially an
| Adaptive Cruise Control, and as they state on their
| website, they scored #1 for best at that by Consumer
| Reports compared to the stock offerings from Ford, Nissan,
| and other carmakers. Frankly, I don't know if _anyone_
| should be including this kind of tech if it's this early,
| but Comma is currently far from the only one for what it
| does. Frankly, because it scored #1 and the code is open-
| source, I'd be much more likely to trust Comma than the
| stock offering from my manufacturer.
| 23iofj wrote:
| _> best at that by Consumer Reports compared to the stock
| offerings from Ford, Nissan, and other carmakers._
|
| Read through the Consumer Reports PDF [1]. It's
| abundantly clear that they have no idea how to properly
| evaluate adaptive cruise systems.
|
| What this report tells you is _exactly_ what you would
| expect from a Consumer Reports publication: the generic
| impression that a typical consumer will have after a few
| hours of use. This sort of superficial analysis is
| completely unrelated to anything approaching a real
| safety analysis.
|
| [1] https://data.consumerreports.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/11/...
| notahacker wrote:
| Yep. It's not "this is less likely to kill you", it's
| "this has a better UI and some sort of ML process that's
| supposed to check you're looking at the road". Somehow
| they score it highly for telling you when you should and
| shouldn't use it for a product whose disclaimer says you
| shouldn't really be using it at all.
|
| It's a bit like declaring your bike outperforms cars in
| crash safety because a magazine gives it 8/10 for
| handling and 9/10 for the visibility of your yellow
| jacket and your rear light having a "flash" mode.
| nicpottier wrote:
| Man, you have a lot of hate for CR. I think their report
| makes it very clear that these aren't recommendations of
| systems in any way but rather an attempt to start
| formalizing testing and the state of various systems that
| are out there. In multiple places they say this is a
| report FOR THE INDUSTRY, not consumers.
|
| They even have a specific callout for Comma:
|
| > A determination was made to include the Comma Two Open
| Pilot system manufactured by > Comma.ai. Although
| Consumer Reports does not endorse after-market
| modifications to all > consumers, we feel that it is
| important to include the test results in this report to
| the industry. The > direct comparison of this system to
| the other OEM systems will hopefully provide insight on
| this > alternative approach and highlight the areas
| across the industry that have room for improvement.
|
| It is at least SOMETHING. I haven't seen anything else
| even close to as formalized that looks across all the
| various systems out there. Do you have better ones to
| look at?
| sodality2 wrote:
| >It enables your car to steer, accelerate, and brake
| automatically within its lane. Drive to a highway, press
| the cruise control SET button, and openpilot will engage
|
| Ah, it isn't marketed as a full autopilot. I'm not 100%
| confident that it should be used in the current state but
| I'm also not an auto regulator, so we shall see.
| sjcoles wrote:
| I have one. Works pretty well but requires a fair bit of
| tweaking. It's called a dev kit for a reason.
|
| Many car models limit the amount (and at what rate) that
| the computer system can turn the wheel. The system is
| piggybacking off of this engineering for most of its
| 'safety'. There was people spoofing park assist on some
| models to get very strong control of the wheel but such
| discussion got banned on the official discord.
|
| Which leads me to my big problem with Comma.ai: it's open
| source but not very open. Look at the code, go back
| several releases and watch the number of comments
| regress.
|
| There's zero documentation, the wiki is a fucking joke
| and for some reason does not come up in a google search
| and is just missing critical information. No, I don't
| want to watch a 5 fucking minute video to find a 10
| second clip with the information I need. Write that shit
| down.
|
| Instead you ask a question and some asshole that is
| gunning for a job at comma posts a passive agressive
| screenshot of them using the discord search. It's almost
| like if you put effort into having information recorded
| instead of being a dick you wouldn't have to be a dick.
| That wouldn't be very fun or inflate egos much so it
| doesn't happen.
| optional_value wrote:
| I think their strategy is selling the technology to car
| manufacturers and investors not average people.
| bbaumgar wrote:
| They have a "Shop" button on their homepage that lets anyone
| buy their product for installation on their own car. I had a
| coworker purchase Comma.ai + a specific make/model solely for
| its Comma.ai compatibility last year. Average people are
| getting in on this, for the better or (likely) worse.
| optional_value wrote:
| But isn't the real value the data they gather to train
| their models? This is where to money is.
| agentdrtran wrote:
| > Who has liability once you start using their solution?
|
| Their FAQ just says "ask your insurance company" lol
| nzmsv wrote:
| They want to avoid thinking about non-engineering things like
| liability for as long as possible and focus on the engineering
| problem. It's a valid approach.
|
| As for the "who has liability" question it's simple: the driver
| does. Or at least it's intended to be simple in the absence of
| lawyers twisting the wording around. Regular, non self driving
| cars have basic driving assists. For example, cruise control
| will happily ram your car into the back of another one.
| Adaptive cruise still has a chance of doing that, plus it has
| the additional risk of causing an accident by randomly slamming
| on the brakes for no reason at all. For all these failure modes
| the liability is understood to lie with the driver: it is up to
| them to be alert enough to override the automation when it
| malfunctions. However, if you do a long distance drive with and
| without cruise control you'll quickly admit that it has value,
| even with all the imperfections. Same for Comma.
| [deleted]
| 23iofj wrote:
| _> They want to avoid thinking about non-engineering things
| like liability for as long as possible and focus on the
| engineering problem. It 's a valid approach._
|
| When you write software that can kill people, you don't get
| to roll your eyes at questions like "who is responsible when
| someone dies?".
|
| These sorts of questions _ARE_ engineering questions, and
| answering these questions with thought and care is important!
| Why? Because if the answer is "this is alpha quality and we
| might be liable" then you wait to deploy the feature. Which
| is why comma.ai is "ahead" of its competitors -- because they
| aren't doing real engineering. Thinking about the real-world
| context into which your system is being deployed is _the_
| thing that separates real engineering from R &D/hacking.
|
| What you're describing is not engineering; it's R&D. Even
| comma.ai admits this. And, look, R&D is perfectly okay!
| Everyone else is also doing R&D on real roads! E.g., all of
| the major auto manufacturers are putting cars on real roads
| with full L5 (and safety driver backups where appropriate).
| In fact, the major auto manufacturers are all _WAY_ ahead of
| comma.ai when it comes to R &D-quality systems! Compare
| Cruise or Argo or Uber ATG or Waymo to comma.ai.
|
| But it's a terrible idea to ship R&D to paying customers when
| lives are on the line. If comma.ai wants to drive their
| system with their own safety drivers, that's fine.
|
| This isn't even (just) a normative or ethical statement. It's
| simply a statement of fact, at least in the USA. For some
| reason Software never became a "real" engineering discipline.
| But automotive
| cwhiz wrote:
| I don't know. How is this fundamentally different than any
| other vehicle modification? Or even any other form of
| driver distraction.
|
| The driver is always responsible. This whole exercise feels
| like people trying to remove themselves from liability so
| that they can feel better about their absurd behavior.
|
| Why can't we keep this simple? The driver is responsible.
| grekiki wrote:
| As long as the product demands a user to be looking at the
| road(and intends to keep it like that for a while), there
| is no reason to spend time figuring out how to solve legal
| issues in case the user isn't responsible.
| 23iofj wrote:
| This is only true for a tiny subset of possible flaws.
|
| Toyota was found legally responsible for its unintended
| acceleration bug from the mid 2000s when "the driver
| should pay attention 100% of the time" wasn't even
| something you would think to say because there were
| exactly zero driver assist features.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| They first famously tried to sell the technology to Tesla.
|
| When that didn't work, I think they set out to develop a proof
| of concept that they could use to generate hype, then wait
| until an automaker wanted to buy their technology to catch up.
|
| I get the impression they cursed future acquisition
| opportunities by refusing to even engage with safety
| regulators. They're now selling their product in clever ways
| designed to shift all liability to the user.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _They're now selling their product in clever ways designed to
| shift all liability to the user._
|
| In "clever ways" that completely fail to succeed in this
| goal, legally speaking. Product liability (law) is _very_
| expansive and generally covers every person in the chain from
| user to manufacturer.
| elicash wrote:
| > I mean whose auto insurance(both collision and more
| importantly liability) has a clause that lets anyone hook up a
| random after market self driving toolkit to their car.
|
| On the one hand, if I get wasted and crash my car into a tree,
| insurers will generally cover that even though I was negligent.
| On the other hand, if I get cheaper home insurance by lying
| about having smoke detectors, and my house burns down, I might
| be in violation of the contract and not be covered.
|
| So it seems like where this SHOULD end up is that insurers
| could charge more (or less as it gets better) for driving with
| these features. That said, I wouldn't fault an insurance
| company for not wanting to cover a system that says in all
| caps, as the linked article points out, "THIS IS ALPHA QUALITY
| SOFTWARE FOR RESEARCH PURPOSES ONLY." I'd possibly equate that
| warning to somebody who got into an accident after doing
| research on how well they could drive steering with their
| teeth, and it'd make me consider broadening the definition of
| "intentional" damage.
| technobabble wrote:
| First off, just because the HN community lays on criticism
| doesn't meant that the people making the criticism don't think
| the technology is a good idea. If I spend the energy to criticize
| $technology, it means that I care about it to an extent. There's
| a baseline level of interest. If I didn't care about $technology,
| then I wouldn't spend the energy to break down into concrete,
| detailed criticism.
|
| Also, the author quotes Peter Thiel, claiming that the current
| cynicism towards self-driving technology is a type of "indefinite
| optimism" that hampers people's ability to plan the future. This
| is juxtaposed with the 1950's-1960's America, where Thiel claims
| "definite optimism" reigned. That type of indefinite optimism, at
| least in 1960's America, did not account for minorities, people
| of color, people of disabilities, etc. There was no future plan
| for them. Indefinite optimism, though it may appear lethargic and
| slow, at least is able to investigate the multitudes of edge-case
| scenarios that any $technology will face.
| Hydraulix989 wrote:
| Now that every car company has its own self driving arm and is
| also working on its own separate drivers assist, the limited time
| window for Comma AI go-to-market under its current approach is
| closing.
| grekiki wrote:
| You know comma2 exists right?
| ilovefood wrote:
| I'm biased, but OP hasn't done any due diligence. Here's from
| 2017 with regards to Audi https://www.audi-
| mediacenter.com/en/technology-lexicon-7180/..., there is also new
| info out there.
|
| "But most importantly let's just stop being so derisive when it
| comes to world changing technologies." You just did it yourself.
| Tepix wrote:
| The AUDI page you linked doesn't contain the words "liable" or
| "liability".
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| How is Comma's behaviour substantially different from Tesla's?
|
| Arguably Comma is being a little more upfront about the user
| being a guinea pig for their software.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| And Comma, if you read their website, shows how Consumer
| Reports compared them to Tesla Autopilot as well as Nissan,
| Ford, and other car manufacturer's stock offering for what is
| essentially Adaptive Cruise Control. CR looked at features and
| safety together and Comma scored #1, so from Comma's
| perspective, they're doing better than what car manufacturers
| are currently selling, and they are certainly way more upfront
| than those manufacturers that you are a guinea pig.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I don't know how they "best Tesla" but it's Not that hard to
| do better than the oem lane assist features. Scoring better
| then super cruise is surprising too, but perhaps that's
| because super cruise is geo fenced.
| 23iofj wrote:
| _> but perhaps that's because super cruise is geo fenced._
|
| Exactly.
|
| The Consumer Reports test wasn't a comprehensive safety
| analysis; it was a superficial "how will this feel to a
| consumer based upon a few drives" analysis. We are talking
| about a consumer reviews magazine... no regulator or jury
| is going to give a shit what a Microwave/Refrigerator
| review website said after performing 37 "tests".
|
| In other words, the other products are "worse" because
| those are production-quality products for which automakers
| with substantial assets to forfeit are willing to accept a
| degree of real liability.
|
| I'm sure if you compared comma.ai to GM's equivalent "alpha
| quality software" -- aka Cruise's L5 prototype -- the
| latter would come out way on top. But GM isn't stupid
| enough to ship alpha quality self-driving software, even as
| an aftermarket add-on.
|
| Including comma.ai in this comparison was a huge oversight
| on the part of Consumer Reports. They should be comparing
| comma.ai to competitors' "alpha" products, which are all L5
| prototypes.
| AlbertoGP wrote:
| Just watched today George Hotz's interview in Lex Fridman's
| podcast from last October, 3 hours talking about many interesting
| things including comma.ai and how it compares with Tesla's
| approach.
|
| He even mentions HN a couple of times:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L3gNaAVjQ4&t=53m35s
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L3gNaAVjQ4&t=2h18m17s
| airstrike wrote:
| Since I didn't know who George Hotz was until yesterday, I
| thought I'd mention he's aka geohot of iOS jailbreaking and PS3
| reverse engineering fame
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz
| zacharyz wrote:
| Still one of my favorite raps of all time https://www.youtube
| .com/watch?v=9iUvuaChDEg&ab_channel=geoho...
| bri3d wrote:
| Python straw man aside, Comma could improve their safety
| dramatically, today, by documenting their safety systems,
| requiring a specific, audited checklist for new vehicles to be
| introduced, producing a real change management and detailed test
| result report for each release, utilizing a real safety processor
| in their "Panda" CAN intercept product, and working to reduce
| their use of bus effects like message-stuffing or first-in-wins
| racing with CAN control messages where possible.
|
| But there's no way I would bring this up in their GitHub, for
| example, because it isn't the culture of the project - and that's
| the problem. For example, their "leader" shows up and makes
| commits to their safety code like "WTF WHY WAS THIS SHIT
| EVERYWHERE."
|
| To Comma's credit, they have made great strides in safety since
| the first two years of their product - since 2018, they've
| introduced safety checks that (while undocumented), seem to be
| somewhat consistent (or trying to be) across vehicles, are
| written in MISRA C which is at least something that's actually
| used in the field, and exist at the low level of the system.
| Commits are signed now, and their founder seems to make fewer
| non-documenting troll commits to the product. These are all signs
| that the company is growing up (and, if we look at the history of
| the company and their leadership, we certainly see some signs as
| to why this may be the case...).
|
| But, these are things that should have been in place since day
| one, and the founders and company were certainly not unaware. It
| is absolutely fair to judge products and companies for the
| decisions they make, ESPECIALLY when their product is purportedly
| "world-changing," and in the case of Comma, safety does not seem
| ingrained into the decision-making process.
|
| As an aside, this blog post is killing me, between extensive
| Peter Thiel quotes, random jabs at California's COVID policy,
| Elon worship, and a lionization of a startup company with an
| immature founder building safety-related hardware.
| offtop5 wrote:
| I think it's a matter of personal responsibility on one hand,
| but rest assured when this product get someone killed, Comma
| will be in court.
|
| I don't think they have the money to fight multiple Court
| challenges, even if you're right you still need to fight. I
| doubt this company will be around in 5 years, and I at least
| hope anyone who installs this thing in their car and then gets
| into an accident loses their license.
| elicash wrote:
| It's not a matter of personal responsibility when drivers
| using this software can crash into other drivers. Just like
| we don't let people drive drunk.
|
| I'm actually not anti-Comma, just responding to this specific
| point.
| 23iofj wrote:
| _> For example, their "leader" shows up and makes commits to
| their safety code like "WTF WHY WAS THIS SHIT EVERYWHERE."_
|
| _Every_ self-driving product that deploys to consumers is
| going to end up in court eventually. It 's inevitable.
|
| Imagine trying to defend comma.ai to a lay jury... the
| prosecution won't even have to try.
| Hydraulix989 wrote:
| I'd pessimistically imagine the real commit trees of actual SDC
| companies then are no different, given the "move fast and break
| things" ethos many of these companies have.
|
| Meanwhile, taking these extra rote precautions (e.g. cut down
| on global state, throw unit tests on everything, don't use go-
| to's) has no real effect when the elephant in the room is that
| even correctly-implemented state-of-the-art machine learning
| models only have classification accuracies in the mid 90%s at
| best.
|
| That's (relatively) fine if you're deciding what ad to show to
| a teenager using TikTok. When we are talking about driving a
| car, that loosely means having an accident every 100 miles.
| Based on publicly available disengagement data, this
| corroborates (only Waymo has surpassed the 1000 mile mark, GM
| might have recently, too).
|
| Meanwhile, verification in this domain only means replaying
| actual recorded sensor data in a "simulation" using one-off
| example scenarios, not doing any kind of formal analysis or
| exhaustive proofs -- which simply don't exist yet for ML.
| There's no real way currently to take an arbitrary mis-
| classified example and determine its root cause -- or even
| correct it within the existing model without reducing accuracy
| elsewhere!
|
| It's literally impossible to avoid being unsafe, so code style
| rules and procedures amount to mere hoop-jumping
| bri3d wrote:
| I agree with you overall - in my post, I was trying to accept
| the premise of the overall safety model: "the ML will break
| but as long as the driver is paying attention it's OK." This
| was out of an effort to be fair to Comma, as, to your point,
| this is the overall state of the industry.
|
| I disagree, however that code style rules and procedures
| amount to hoop-jumping, as not every failure mode is the same
| (especially if you do accept the driver-attention / driver-
| in-control premise). An unexpected failure at the control
| layer (especially the control override layer) is a different
| class of failure to an unexpected direction command from the
| ML model, for example.
| bri3d wrote:
| I cannot edit my original post any more, but a helpful HNer
| "DesolationJones" was able to provide a little bit more insight
| into Comma's safety strategy using information trawled from
| Reddit comments and Medium posts:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26158158 .
|
| It seems that Comma are actively working on documenting their
| safety systems (via a new hire to own this task) and creating
| an audited checklist. And, there is a "new vehicle" checklist
| enumerated in a Medium post including some safety constraints,
| although in reading the Panda "safety" tree, I found no actual
| acknowledgement that these specific constraints were audited
| for each vehicle addition.
|
| So, it seems that the great strides since 2018 continue - once
| these promises come true, they will have almost reached what I
| would consider the baseline level for a safety-related
| automotive system. Perhaps they will be able to secure an exit
| this way - I am actually rather surprised they haven't, given
| the froth level in this space as well as the valuable training
| data they have collected from their users.
| commaai wrote:
| We aren't interested in an exit. Our mission is to "solve
| self driving cars while delivering shippable intermediaries"
| godelzilla wrote:
| >Elon Musk is trying to save humanity and colonize Mars
|
| That sweet, delicious, HN kool-aid.
| atty wrote:
| I think the author is guilty of exactly what he's accusing
| everyone else of. The major car companies are delivering
| relatively high quality products at scale (we have decent
| certainty it's high quality because the presence of many of these
| driver assist features correlate with reduced accidents). And
| they're rolling out slowly without a ton of stories of cars going
| haywire and flying off the road. And of course certain cars will
| only have certain features (addressing his Ford complaint)
| because those features require the correct mix of sensors and
| compute that is not yet present on every vehicle. That's how
| technology that can affect personal safety should be rolled out.
| Slowly, carefully, and very boringly.
|
| Releasing "alpha" level software and saying essentially "lol have
| fun idk" when it can significantly impact customer safety is
| childish, bad business, morally wrong, and something we as an
| industry need to move away from. It doesn't matter if your
| customer base are early adopters, hackers, or open source
| supporters. You still owe them their safety and a reasonable and
| coherent privacy policy.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I detest geo/comma for doing this as much as musk.
|
| Plus it's a toyish feature
| bko wrote:
| I didn't mean to shit on big auto and I like their features. My
| car has collision detection that I find pretty reliable and
| useful. My main complaint is what I see as the unfair attacks
| of comma.ai by engineers where we should be applauding his
| efforts and openness, especially compared to the competition.
|
| I don't see the Ford complaint as them introducing features
| slowly and carefully. To me its a code smell. But my biggest
| complaint is that its opaque. If they had a detailed
| description of the features, what sensors are used and their
| limitations, then I would be much happier. But instead they
| have nothing more than a name and a trademark.
|
| Again, the "alpha" level doesn't mean anything. Hotz is
| immature and some of his actions are regretful. It certainly
| doesn't live up to the thought and care he puts into his
| products. Of course, I don't know the guy but I have heard him
| speak for hours and was very impressed.
| [deleted]
| atty wrote:
| Why would having different features be a code smell? I would
| compare it more to purchasing version X or Y of photoshop, or
| something similar. If you buy and older or cheaper version of
| the software, you get a different feature set.
|
| I can completely agree the naming and descriptions are
| horrendous though. I think that as more of these technologies
| start to provide assistance in more areas of driving, more of
| the time, education and transparency are nearly as important
| as safety. And that's an area where every one of these
| projects is failing to a greater or lesser degree.
| bko wrote:
| It just strikes me as a patch work.
|
| Consider BLIS (Blind Spot Information System) with Cross-
| Traffic Alert.
|
| I imagine there's an engineer that created a function
| isBlindSpot(state, "right") as opposed to a more
| comprehensive system of object detection, where it'll be
| able to tell you if there's a blind spot but also be
| integral in Intersection Assist (a separate feature in the
| 2021 Mustang Mach-E).
|
| Of course I could be wrong, and the features could be an
| interface to a more comprehensive system, but my hunch is
| that it's more segmented.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > And they're rolling out slowly without a ton of stories of
| cars going haywire and flying off the road.
|
| Automakers and Comma are operating at completely different
| scales. Orders of magnitude apart. You're going to hear about
| more autopilot issues from major manufacturers because there
| are far, far more of them on the road. Comma only has a small
| group of loyal customers who make the leap to buy and modify
| their car.
|
| Comma also incentivizes customers to keep quiet if the
| autopilot fails. The drivers can't blame a multinational
| automaker if something goes wrong. They have to admit that they
| modified their car with an aftermarket device that hasn't been
| safety tested. Comma even provides disclaimers that their
| product isn't production ready. If it fails, the customer
| doesn't have much incentive to broadcast to the world that they
| bought, installed, and used a product on public roads that was
| advertised as being not ready for prime time.
|
| It's false to equate Comma's software strategy with that of
| major automakers. At minimum, automakers are working with
| safety regulators. Comma has gone to great lengths to
| specifically avoid dealing with anything safety related.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| >> The drivers can't blame a multinational automaker if
| something goes wrong. They have to admit that they modified
| their car with an aftermarket device that hasn't been safety
| tested. Comma even provides disclaimers that their product
| isn't production ready. If it fails, the customer doesn't
| have much incentive to broadcast to the world that they
| bought, installed, and used a product on public roads that
| was advertised as being not ready for prime time.
|
| Well this is just terrifying.
|
| I'm wondering if there have been any serious accidents where
| a driver was using his software and got taken to court over
| the repercussions of the accident.
|
| Thinking about tens of thousands of people using this
| software on the road is pretty scary.
| giobox wrote:
| The situation in say a Tesla or any other new car isn't
| much better under most driving rule regimes out there
| today. Fault for accident is virtually always the driver,
| regardless of whether automated or assist systems in use.
| This includes Tesla's Autopilot when used in the United
| States, you don't get to blame Tesla at least not today.
|
| Personally, I can't wait for wider adoption of mature
| "assisted driving" products in the future - I find the idea
| of that future a lot less scary than the millions of not so
| great human drivers we have to deal with right now.
|
| The biggest problem I have with Comma is that the quality
| of the camera installation will vary enormously between
| users even if we assume the software to be perfect. At
| least in a car certified for production you can mandate the
| cameras, sensors etc be attached permanently to the vehicle
| in relatively sound locations, vastly reduced risk of them
| falling off and causing a bad steering or other control
| input.
| bko wrote:
| > Automakers and Comma are operating at completely different
| scales. Orders of magnitude apart.
|
| Super Cruise has 7 million miles driven [0]. Comma has 35
| million miles driven [1]
|
| > Comma also incentivizes customers to keep quiet if the
| autopilot fails
|
| How do you figure? The amount of weird hatred people have
| towards comma is much more than Cadillac. You can find
| literally hours of real life video of comma driving in cars.
| Professional reviewers like Consumer Reports don't have a pro
| comma bias. Comma doesn't have a PR guy or teams of lawyers.
| They're not a hundred billion dollar company. They're a dozen
| or so engineers. They have no influence over trade
| publications or blogs. I think people and reviewers would
| judge comma much more harshly than they would big auto.
|
| > At minimum, automakers are working with safety regulators
|
| > openpilot is developed in good faith to be compliant with
| FMVSS requirements and to follow industry standards of safety
| for Level 2 Driver Assistance Systems. In particular, we
| observe ISO26262 guidelines, including those from pertinent
| documents released by NHTSA. In addition, we impose strict
| coding guidelines (like MISRA C : 2012) on parts of openpilot
| that are safety relevant. We also perform software-in-the-
| loop, hardware-in-the-loop and in-vehicle tests before each
| software release. [2]
|
| Please point me to the safety documents of the
| competitors.Most don't even have driver monitoring like
| comma.
|
| [0] https://www.cadillac.com/world-of-
| cadillac/innovation/super-...
|
| [1] comma.ai
|
| [2]
| https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/master/SAFETY.md
| redis_mlc wrote:
| > Super Cruise has 7 million miles driven [0]. Comma has 35
| million miles driven [1]
|
| I suggest you look at the quality of those miles.
|
| I used to live on one of the streets used by Google, and
| they were driving the same miles over and over in Mountain
| View. My street had zero traffic except during commute
| times.
| slg wrote:
| >> Automakers and Comma are operating at completely
| different scales. Orders of magnitude apart.
|
| >Super Cruise has 7 million miles driven [0]. Comma has 35
| million miles driven [1]
|
| Tesla has likely exceeded 4,000 million miles with
| Autopilot at this point versus Comma's 35. That certainly
| qualifies as "different scales" and "orders of magnitude
| apart".
|
| It is also frankly bizarre that the author of this article
| barely even mentions Tesla while treating Cadillac and Audi
| as the primary competitors for Comma.
| bko wrote:
| I'm the author. I agree Tesla is miles ahead, but they're
| not offering the same product.
|
| Comma is comfortably level 2 self driving, essentially
| lane keep. They don't detect red lights or stop signs,
| the don't have navigation or even maps. It just keeps you
| going in a straight line, with or without lane markings.
| It's much more comparable to something like Super Cruise.
|
| My point was that lane keep assist technology exists as
| features in new cars. That's the target market and that's
| what comma should be benchmarked against. If you have a
| problem with comma's safety features you should have an
| even bigger issue with that of the large auto makers.
| slg wrote:
| Sorry if this comes off as rude, but this comment shows
| you don't really know what you are talking about. Tesla
| offers two driver assistance products. There is Autopilot
| and Full Self-Driving Capability. All Autopilot does is
| autosteering and adaptive cruise control[1]. The more
| advance stuff like detecting red lights and stop signs
| are part of the FSD package which needs to be purchased
| separately. Autopilot and Comma seem like natural fits
| for a direct comparison.
|
| [1] - https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot
| bko wrote:
| That's fair. I honestly didn't look into Tesla because
| I'm almost certain they're more advanced and a comparison
| would be kind of pointless. Tesla is better than
| comma.ai, but from what I've seen, comma.ai is at least
| comparable to the non-Tesla adaptive cruise control.
| commaai wrote:
| We believe Tesla is 1-2 years ahead of us, and that's
| held fairly true since the beginning of comma.
| bko wrote:
| The man himself. You're a legend Hotz. Check out my sound
| cloud. Wait, I forgot, I don't have a sound cloud.
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