Hotz is quoted as saying in the article, "there are only three real competitors: Waymo, Tesla and us."
That's total bullshit. There are so many companies seriously working on autonomous vehicles, such as GM Cruise, Auroa Innovation, Drive.ai, Zoox, Nuro.ai, nuTonomy, Varden Labs, AImotive, Ford, and Nvidia
Edit, because George is on here: George, I want to like you, because I think your tech is really good (the street image segmentation from RGB images is seriously impressive- https://commacoloring.herokuapp.com/) and I think your business model of offering cheap devices and free services to crowd-source data, along with the comma points to incentivize users could give you a big competitive advantage. But the hyperbole makes it difficult to take you seriously.
This is the guy who was supposedly just a few weeks away from shipping a bolt-on smart cruise control module, then immediately canceled the entire thing when the NHTSA asked him some questions about its safety. He seems pretty sharp when it comes to technology, but I'm not sure if he's prepared to make actual products sold to regular people.
The questions he was asked were pretty darn reasonable, IMO. If he's unwilling or unable to answer those questions I have no problem at all with him being prohibited from selling a product that his customers would literally be trusting with their lives.
If he knew about it then why would he have even started the project? It's obvious that regulators would be involved in a project like this. I don't see how he didn't anticipate this from the start.
You are literally agreeing with everyone accusing him of being ignorant though. You think you're defending him, but this is what everyone is saying. The fact that dealing with NHTSA or what that entails is "hindsight" to him is what makes him almost mind-bogglingly ignorant here. I would think a precocious 12-year-old would have been able to predict that, or at least would have the smarts to, say, at least ask somebody ahead of time (like a lawyer) what legal hurdles his business (that has life-and-death consequences, and that he sought funding for) might have to deal with in the future. His own explanation for what happened makes him sound way worse than if he hadn't explained it at all.
Cruise sold for >$1B. If he thought his company was better off than that, it is supremely irrational to not put up with the pain of the NHTSA. Hell, just hire a lawyer to do everything and you don't even need to think about it.
No, from my guess, Hotz copped out when he realized that his prototype, while fun, was no where near production ready and would be completely illegal to ship to any customers.
This is my personal opinion, so take it with a grain of salt.
Hotz never seemed like the guy who would do things similar to what Cruise did. Vogt had already sold two startups prior to Cruise, and he was well versed in the tactics of the startup world. Have great articles put out, polished PR touches, the whole works.
OTOH, Hotz had this 'Hacker' air to whatever he does. From the iPhone, to PlayStation, to even hacking the cars he was building the tech with, he had a very different attitude compared to the let's-be-poised-for-a-buyout vibe that many startups give. Startups like Cruise are scared of breaking rules, worrying about how it might bite them later in the day.
If you ask me, Cruise was never going to make it on its own. The major car companies have decades of supply chain process management and huge amounts of capital behind them. Cruise couldn't never do what it said it would do, and I would imagine, a buy out was always on the founders minds.
Comma.ai is a different beast. They aren't really worried about rules. That's terrible attitude for a 'startup', I agree. People here have valid arguments about thinking about the NHTSA before hand, but I think they just dared to go ahead without giving a crap. It backfired, but I wouldn't attribute his decision to failure in building a working product.
There is a TWIST episode with this guy on it, and he comes of as a massively arrogant prick. The dude who created the first iPhone jailbreak in his teens and got famous at it.
He did a lot more than just jailbreak an old iPhone. The dude's good, who cares if he's arrogant? There's hundreds of big corporations manipulating media for financial gains.
Are you gonna hate this guy just because he has a face and a personal reputation?
Or are you going to watch with bemused interest as he successfully scales the obstacles and actually puts some nice products out there.
My (not GP) issue with him comes from all his whining over the NHTSA stuff. You can't talk about how easy the problem is and how much better you are, and then fold when safety regulators show up. That to me says that he may be incredible at building things, but doesn't know how to take it the last mile. Sure, you can argue against the regulation, but I for one think that self driving cars should have strict safety regulation. And from what I read they weren't asking anything crazy of him that they wouldn't of anyone else.
he released the hardware plans, specs, and software as opensource. You can go build it, today. And if you have a supported car (currently certain honda civics, and accura ILX's.. soon honda crv, toyota prius, and chevy bolt/volt) you can actually use it, today. There are videos on youtube of people doing exactly that.
Changing your business model, is IMO.. the opposite of folding. it's adapting.
He threw a tantrum on twitter to save face. If you want to admire him for his hacking efforts that's one thing (and honestly I don't even agree with that for his work on self-driving cars), but he hasn't done much to build a business yet.
Udacity has their own self-driving vehicle. They built it for their Self-Driving Vehicle Car Engineer Nanodegree program; I just started term 3 yesterday, and apparently they're going ahead with the plan for student to run code on it.
Apparently, they have a test track, and will have a safety driver on-board. For that part of the term (dubbed "Integration"), we'll be broken into teams of 10-20 students, and (somehow) have to coordinate on building the software pieces to run on the vehicle. This will all be done using a custom simulator designed to replicate the test track (similar to what has already been used). Once something is working, the group will then merge the pieces (nodes and modules for ROS and something called AutoWare) all together in a shared github repo. That'll be shipped over to Udacity for testing on "track days", and results sent back to the team for analysis.
I'm not sure how well this whole thing is going to work; it's very much an experiment that I believe is unique for a MOOC and hasn't been tried before (develop software as a group project of international students, to drive a real self-driving vehicle on a test track in Mountain View, CA - yep, that seems reasonable).
I guess we'll see when we get there. The vehicle is named "Carla", and (overall) it is open-sourced. Here are some links to learn more about it:
The vehicle itself is apparently some standard vehicle converted by a third-party company (for the life of me, I can't recall the make or model of the vehicle, nor the company that did the conversion!); if you wanted to DIY this yourself at full scale, you'd basically want a vehicle that uses a mostly drive-by-wire control system for the brakes, accelerator, and steering. If that isn't available, then something that uses electro-hydraulic power braking and steering (or electric power-steering) would be the next best thing.
I'd shy away from trying to do this with a standard vehicle; building the actuators you would need to control everything is not a trivial thing to do (and especially to do so safely and reliably).
Honestly, if you really wanted to do this, and you didn't want to kill yourself, others, or damage property (as much?) - start out smaller with an RC car or similar. There are plenty of examples on how to do this on the internet, but my favorite go-to example is this one:
That one occupies a "soft spot" in me because David Singleton was one of the original students in the Stanford-sponsored ML Class of 2011, taught by Andrew Ng. I was a part of that class; it taught us enough to build such a vehicle, and David was inspired to do so and follow thru with it. What used to cost hundreds-of-thousands of dollars (if not millions) back in the 1980s:
Final note: I don't have any association with any of this other than being a student in the Udacity course and interested in learning about this technology.
It's a Lincoln MKZ. A number of partners helped us with the conversion, including AutonomouStuff and NVidia.
And yes - we're running student code on the car, around a test track, and we'll send you the results (I think a video feed as well). It's your final project in the Self-Driving Car Nanodegree program.
I can't wait to watch the first time a student's code drives it around the track.
He seems to be quite above average, the issue is the ratio hubris / math skillz still seems improperly balanced.
If my sunday psychology profile is correct, he seems to be passionated and fast to hack around and displeased by big corporations business model + slowness + suboptimality. Thus trying to dig diagonally on his own without the enterprise cruft. So far so good, the issue is that it seems he's lying about his abilities. He managed to do 20% and spins it as 70% claiming he'll be at 100% before everybody else. Without independant testing and legislation of course.
Cruise had lane following and smart cruise control, which everybody in the industry has and can be bought as an option on many high-end cars right now. They hyped this heavily and GM bought it.
That was surprising, because GM had a good self-driving effort with CMU, and had progressed to driving in Washington DC traffic autonomously.[1] That was way ahead of Cruise, and working in 2013. Then, somehow, GM totally blew it and lost that project, with the people going elsewhere.
Every Toyota comes equipped with lane following and smart cruise control. They call it Toyota Safety Sense, and even the lowest priced, $18k Corolla has it.
That's great for software that runs on your computer, it's not so great for software that runs on a car and can kill people. Regulatory bodies exist for a reason, onerous though they may be.
Edit: I'm actually curious now that I think about it. Are there any good examples of hacker projects (or specifically projects that aren't intended to make money or pay people's salaries) that had to deal with any sort of regulatory hurdles?
This is a depressing comment. I'm assuming the parent comment is talking about GNU, Linux, the variety of userspace software from Unix times... not node.js template systems.
Linux didn't become particularly useful or relevant until folks spent a whole lot of very businessy time and money on it. That's why RedHat even exists (not that they were alone, but they survived).
GNU wasn't hackers in the meaning of 2010s hackers. It took smart individuals and years to come up with something tangibles. Same for Linux.
I cannot compare anything in the casual software world, no matter how complex it is, to driving a car in streets. It's bridging physics and AI. Maybe hotz has a point and other SDV module vendors are as fake but that's irrelevant.
I doubt Geohotz didn't do his homework before he made this conclusion. He went to CMU, Google and Facebook and had worked with the smartest professors/scientists/engineers in the field of AI before he founded Comma.ai. He's pretty much single-handed built a level 3 drive assist prototype within a year where other companies spent billions and many years R&D but not even came close to what he was originally intended to release.[1]
So when George said, "there are only three real competitors: Waymo, Tesla and us." What he really says is that Comma.ai's technology is on par with Waymo and Tesla's. The rest of the companies are either subpar or have no existing product to demo, likely both.
He also famously said "shippability" is the biggest differentiator between Comma One and the rest but decided not to fight the uphill legal battle being that he's taking the Android approach to grab the market share.
That's total bullshit. There are so many companies seriously working on autonomous vehicles, such as GM Cruise, Auroa Innovation, Drive.ai, Zoox, Nuro.ai, nuTonomy, Varden Labs, AImotive, Ford, and Nvidia
Edit, because George is on here: George, I want to like you, because I think your tech is really good (the street image segmentation from RGB images is seriously impressive- https://commacoloring.herokuapp.com/) and I think your business model of offering cheap devices and free services to crowd-source data, along with the comma points to incentivize users could give you a big competitive advantage. But the hyperbole makes it difficult to take you seriously.