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What this article tries its damnedest to elide is the narrative-wrecking fact that Holtz, confronted with a standard request to demonstrate that his product mee

What this article tries its damnedest to elide is the narrative-wrecking fact that Holtz, confronted with a standard request to demonstrate that his product meets regulatory standards, took his ball and went home. /Exactly/ why he threw a tantrum is anyone's guess -- but there doesn't seem to be any real good possibility. Either his product couldn't meet standards and this is an attempt to obfuscate that inconvenient fact, or he withdrew a working product because he was so affronted by the fact that the NHTSA dared challenge him -- hardly a defensible, or confidence-inspiring, behavior.

stale2002 10y ago
Well, maybe the reason is that these regulator requests costs tons of money to fulfill because no, you cannot you give simple laymans answers to the questions, you need a team of lawyers to do this work, because everything you say in these "simple" requests can and will be used against you. And perhaps there are better uses of their time, and better regulatory environments where they can release their product. Maybe in a couple months we are going to hear about the imminent release of the Comma Two in Not-America. I seriously doubt they've gone home. There are tons of places where they could starting selling right NOW. America's loss, other countries' gain.
- EpicEng 10y ago
  >Well, maybe the reason is that these regulator requests costs tons of money to fulfill because no, you cannot you give simple laymans answers to the questions, you need a team of lawyers to do this work, because everything you say in these "simple" requests can and will be used against you No, what you need is to have followed a sufficient quality process to begin with. Lawyers aren't involved heavily in this sort of thing; your quality group is (well, it may take more lawyering for them at this point.) This guy obviously didn't have a clue when he set out to build this thing and now his ignorance is biting him in the ass. I've worked on FDA regulated devices my entire career. You don't get to just throw things that represent a substantial safety risk onto the market without oversight, and that's a good thing.
- Kadin 10y ago
  The request is well within the realm of what anyone who wants to produce a product that could well endanger the lives of a lot of people needs to be able to deal with. It was the very minor ante required in order to play at a very high-stakes table.
- tptacek 10y ago
  Daniel Berlin, an attorney with regs experience, on another thread on HN, said: no, you can pretty much just respond to NHTSA with straightforward answers and whatever documentation you have, then arrange a conference with them to figure out what additional documentation you'd need to generate to move forward with your plans. I don't believe it's the case that Hotz needed to incur six figure legal bills to respond to NHTSA's initial order. He probably could have responded to NHTSA personally, without counsel, and game-theoretically not damaged his potential outcomes at all. He had the option to find out, and threw it away.
- dpark 10y ago
  > Maybe in a couple months we are going to hear about the imminent release of the Comma Two in Not-America. I seriously doubt they've gone home. There are tons of places where they could starting selling right NOW. Then I'm very thankful for the NHTSA we have in America. I don't want a bunch of half-ass, poorly-engineered self-driving cars on our roads. I use those roads, and so do my family members. While I'm looking forward to self-driving cars taking over, I don't want the Comma One in the field if they can't handle the most basic safety inquiries.
  - exergy 10y ago
    The guy that you're replying to seems to have no idea how these things work. I worked for an automotive manufacturer in India (hardly a paragon of virtue in terms of regulatory strictness), and we had rules about even seemingly-inane stuff like the HVAC being able to cool the car down in a certain amount of time, and maintain a given temperature overnight on a cold night etc. You can't just walk in being an arrogant, know-it-all whiz kid and demand that the rules be bent and mere mortals be forced to step aside in deference to your superior intellect.
    - stale2002 10y ago
      Nowhere, in the ENTIRE WORLD of 7 BILLION PEOPLE could you release something like this? It doesn't matter if most people reject your idea, you only need a couple cities to say "approved for preliminary testing for a limited number/couple thousand beta testers" to go into Prod. And then when you go into prod you get real life data and can prove that your product really is as awesome as you say it is, THEN you go back to the countries that said no, but this time with more money and actual facts to back you up. This isn't some super expensive product that is out of reach for the world. This is a thousand dollar conversion kit. If these things were available and I owned a Honda, I would have bought it to just mess around with it instead of buying the HTC Vive that I got last night. I am sure there are lots of beta customers around the world who would be interested in getting a prelim beta version.
  - AsyncAwait 10y ago
    > Then I'm very thankful for the NHTSA we have in America. I don't want a bunch of half-ass, poorly-engineered self-driving cars on our roads. I use those roads, and so do my family members. That sounds like you think that other countries would allow "a bunch of half-ass, poorly-engineered self-driving cars on our roads"? As an EU citizen, I can assure you that this is widely off the mark.
agildehaus 10y ago
There were major problems with every demo I saw of the product. In one video, the camera lost tracking of the road due to lighting conditions not being favorable for contrast. In another, Hotz seemed far too amazed that the car properly took a gentle bend in the highway. Confidence is not something I would assign to his product. Or any product that is a camera-only lane-follower. That Holtz caves at the slightest thought of a regulator looking at his work easily shows how immature he is as an engineer.
- vvanders 10y ago
  Yup, can't agree more. If you're in the space you had to know these type of questions were coming and you'd have to deal with it. There's a long road from a working prototype to a shipping product.
- dexterdog 10y ago
  Where was it established that it was camera-only? My understanding was that it used the existing sensors with the camera.
- gst 10y ago
  > There were major problems with every demo I saw of the product. Doesn't surprise me, after reading http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driving-car/ http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driv...: "Instead of the hundreds of thousands of lines of code found in other self-driving vehicles, Hotz’s software is based on about 2,000 lines." In general I like the approach of using deep-learning instead of complex hardcoded rules (see the article above for more details), but even with deep-learning you're going to need a complex ruleset in order to deal with the edge-cases. Getting a prototype of a self-driving car working is probably much less than 5% of the overall amount of work that's required. Getting the car respond correctly to the long tail of edge cases is the other 95% of the work.
  - smrtinsert 10y ago
    Who brags about 2000 loc when safety is at risk? Seems very immature, and not confidence inspiring.

stale2002 10y ago

Well, maybe the reason is that these regulator requests costs tons of money to fulfill because no, you cannot you give simple laymans answers to the questions, you need a team of lawyers to do this work, because everything you say in these "simple" requests can and will be used against you. And perhaps there are better uses of their time, and better regulatory environments where they can release their product. Maybe in a couple months we are going to hear about the imminent release of the Comma Two in Not-America. I seriously doubt they've gone home. There are tons of places where they could starting selling right NOW. America's loss, other countries' gain.

EpicEng 10y ago
>Well, maybe the reason is that these regulator requests costs tons of money to fulfill because no, you cannot you give simple laymans answers to the questions, you need a team of lawyers to do this work, because everything you say in these "simple" requests can and will be used against you No, what you need is to have followed a sufficient quality process to begin with. Lawyers aren't involved heavily in this sort of thing; your quality group is (well, it may take more lawyering for them at this point.) This guy obviously didn't have a clue when he set out to build this thing and now his ignorance is biting him in the ass. I've worked on FDA regulated devices my entire career. You don't get to just throw things that represent a substantial safety risk onto the market without oversight, and that's a good thing.
Kadin 10y ago
The request is well within the realm of what anyone who wants to produce a product that could well endanger the lives of a lot of people needs to be able to deal with. It was the very minor ante required in order to play at a very high-stakes table.
tptacek 10y ago
Daniel Berlin, an attorney with regs experience, on another thread on HN, said: no, you can pretty much just respond to NHTSA with straightforward answers and whatever documentation you have, then arrange a conference with them to figure out what additional documentation you'd need to generate to move forward with your plans. I don't believe it's the case that Hotz needed to incur six figure legal bills to respond to NHTSA's initial order. He probably could have responded to NHTSA personally, without counsel, and game-theoretically not damaged his potential outcomes at all. He had the option to find out, and threw it away.
dpark 10y ago
> Maybe in a couple months we are going to hear about the imminent release of the Comma Two in Not-America. I seriously doubt they've gone home. There are tons of places where they could starting selling right NOW. Then I'm very thankful for the NHTSA we have in America. I don't want a bunch of half-ass, poorly-engineered self-driving cars on our roads. I use those roads, and so do my family members. While I'm looking forward to self-driving cars taking over, I don't want the Comma One in the field if they can't handle the most basic safety inquiries.
- exergy 10y ago
  The guy that you're replying to seems to have no idea how these things work. I worked for an automotive manufacturer in India (hardly a paragon of virtue in terms of regulatory strictness), and we had rules about even seemingly-inane stuff like the HVAC being able to cool the car down in a certain amount of time, and maintain a given temperature overnight on a cold night etc. You can't just walk in being an arrogant, know-it-all whiz kid and demand that the rules be bent and mere mortals be forced to step aside in deference to your superior intellect.
  - stale2002 10y ago
    Nowhere, in the ENTIRE WORLD of 7 BILLION PEOPLE could you release something like this? It doesn't matter if most people reject your idea, you only need a couple cities to say "approved for preliminary testing for a limited number/couple thousand beta testers" to go into Prod. And then when you go into prod you get real life data and can prove that your product really is as awesome as you say it is, THEN you go back to the countries that said no, but this time with more money and actual facts to back you up. This isn't some super expensive product that is out of reach for the world. This is a thousand dollar conversion kit. If these things were available and I owned a Honda, I would have bought it to just mess around with it instead of buying the HTC Vive that I got last night. I am sure there are lots of beta customers around the world who would be interested in getting a prelim beta version.
- AsyncAwait 10y ago
  > Then I'm very thankful for the NHTSA we have in America. I don't want a bunch of half-ass, poorly-engineered self-driving cars on our roads. I use those roads, and so do my family members. That sounds like you think that other countries would allow "a bunch of half-ass, poorly-engineered self-driving cars on our roads"? As an EU citizen, I can assure you that this is widely off the mark.

agildehaus 10y ago

There were major problems with every demo I saw of the product. In one video, the camera lost tracking of the road due to lighting conditions not being favorable for contrast. In another, Hotz seemed far too amazed that the car properly took a gentle bend in the highway. Confidence is not something I would assign to his product. Or any product that is a camera-only lane-follower. That Holtz caves at the slightest thought of a regulator looking at his work easily shows how immature he is as an engineer.

vvanders 10y ago
Yup, can't agree more. If you're in the space you had to know these type of questions were coming and you'd have to deal with it. There's a long road from a working prototype to a shipping product.
dexterdog 10y ago
Where was it established that it was camera-only? My understanding was that it used the existing sensors with the camera.
gst 10y ago
> There were major problems with every demo I saw of the product. Doesn't surprise me, after reading http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driving-car/ http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driv...: "Instead of the hundreds of thousands of lines of code found in other self-driving vehicles, Hotz’s software is based on about 2,000 lines." In general I like the approach of using deep-learning instead of complex hardcoded rules (see the article above for more details), but even with deep-learning you're going to need a complex ruleset in order to deal with the edge-cases. Getting a prototype of a self-driving car working is probably much less than 5% of the overall amount of work that's required. Getting the car respond correctly to the long tail of edge cases is the other 95% of the work.
- smrtinsert 10y ago
  Who brags about 2000 loc when safety is at risk? Seems very immature, and not confidence inspiring.