6 ms·

He says it's better than anything other than the Tesla, yet he ran away the moment NHTSA looked into his project. I've been around long enough to know when some

by AmVess 10y ago

He says it's better than anything other than the Tesla, yet he ran away the moment NHTSA looked into his project. I've been around long enough to know when something smells like bs, looks like bs, and sounds like bs...it's bs.

wyager 10y ago
> yet he ran away the moment NHTSA looked into his project To be fair, this could have nothing to do with the quality of the project. I don't want anything to do with the NHTSA (or any other government regulatory body) if I can help it.
- Oletros 10y ago
  > To be fair, this could have nothing to do with the quality of the project To be fair, looking at the code, it has all to do with the quality of the project
  - cleeus 10y ago
    Do you happen to know where the code is? Can you post a link?
    - LukeB_UK 10y ago
      https://github.com/commaai/openpilot https://github.com/commaai/openpilot
      - cleeus 10y ago
        doesn't look to bad except: - I can't find automated tests - The vision module is a binary blob (of course this was also stated in the previous HN discussion) The rest is basically just a bunch of glue and bootloader code.
    - Oletros 10y ago
      Ninjaed by LukeB Here there is a discussion about the github repo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13073331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13073331
- redthrowaway 10y ago
  >I don't want anything to do with the NHTSA (or any other government regulatory body) if I can help it. Great, so don't make software for self-driving cars.
  - wyager 10y ago
    Well, I would just do what this guy is doing and make the software available for free. This is preferable to never making the software at all. If the NHTSA manages to put a chilling effect on open AI research, that's a great example of government regulation indirectly hurting a lot more than it helps.
- icebraining 10y ago
  So you're saying he may have been convinced he could make a self-driving car in the US and avoid dealing with the regulatory bodies? Sounds like your opinion of him is even worse than the above.
captainmuon 10y ago
I could imagine NHTSA was pressing him too early for his taste. I don't know Hotz personally, so I can just guess his motives, but if it was me I might react in the same way. After all, this is basically still a hobby project (although announced like a product and made by a very clever guy). Who knows if he even has the money and time to implement NHTSA's demands?
- akerl_ 10y ago
  It doesn't seem like a hobby project given he accepted VC funding for it.
- Jarwain 10y ago
  The NHTSA seemed to only request for comma.ai to push back a release date until further testing happened. As for the money >Well, we have Andreesen Horowitz [the VC firm], which provided $3.1 million, and we spent under $1 million to do all of this.
  - trymas 10y ago
    I am interested where's the profit behind this funding, if it's given away? Or the funding is just to buy the person/people/team to make some innovative products or work in some other self driving car research teams?
    - usrusr 10y ago
      The experience won while writing that code could be a lot more valuable than the code itself. If ever a car company was interested in building on top of what comma.ai has done so far, they would hire (or acqui-hire, that's the VC bet) the heads and have them rewrite the code together with more formal engineers. But when nobody is buying comma.ai, nothing of that will happen. The (little, given the domain) money invested will only have been sponsorship of a romanticized take on hacker culture. Which may actually have been a contributing factor in the investment decision here, this a frugal garage operation, not a fast-burning startup with fancy offices. Open sourcing some code can create visibility, without it we would not be talking about this today. From the investment perspective, opening this code is clearly a hail-mary-pass. There are situations when those are the best course of action and I think this is one of them.
ttflee 10y ago
By bs, do you mean poor practices like the one in throttle control system for Toyota Camry (which NHTSA/NASA failed to detect)? http://www.embedded.com/electronics-news/4423365/Toyota-Camry-L4-case--the-single-bit-flip-that-killed http://www.embedded.com/electronics-news/4423365/Toyota-Camr... http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer-firmware--Bad-design-and-its-consequences http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer...
- argonaut 10y ago
  If accurate this would be evidence that the NHTSA isn't very stringent, which would actually make Hotz's self driving project seem even worse.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    The poor practices at Toyota are true (as in "established as fact in a court"). The NHTSA are indeed not very stringent as they don't really pro-actively audit systems, they rely on compliance documentation.
    - seren 10y ago
      I believe this is how every regulatory agency works over the world, they don't do any tests on your products, you only submit documentation related to your development and tests. They are basically looking for proof that you did required things such as specifications, tests, risks management... They are looking into your development process to estimate if your product is safe or not. But this is only indirect. Until you actually kill someone, and then, the same agency will send you its investigators and auditors.
      - pjc50 10y ago
        I thought FCC approval required lab testing by an approved lab, while for CE self-certification is acceptable? UL actually do testing, although they're not exactly a regulatory agency.
iiiggglll 10y ago
This whole thing is ridiculous. It only works because it piggybacks on the hard work of engineers at major manufacturers who put front-facing radar into their vehicles, plus a little bit of image recognition based lane keeping running on a smartphone. It's not "self-driving". It's time to put this sort of thing into perspective: it's Yet Another Half-Baked Level 2 Automation System (YAHBL2AS ?).[1] The world doesn't need another one of those. There's nothing new here. For reference, there's a comment elsewhere in this very HN thread from someone who said they did image recognition based lane keeping as a university project, and they said they did it 10 years ago using Matlab. If there is going to be a new AI "winter" (and I'm starting to think that's more and more likely every day), it will probably be the result of too much hype around overblown ego-driven claims such as this. Hotz is probably doing more harm than good at this point. [1] http://www.sae.org/misc/pdfs/automated_driving.pdf http://www.sae.org/misc/pdfs/automated_driving.pdf
- ainiriand 10y ago
  I agree with you in some aspects but in the project description it is not mentioned the "self-driving" part, and I quote: 'Currently it performs the functions of Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and Lane Keeping Assist System (LKAS)'. This I can believe is performed, at some degree. Do you think the media can be overinflating the whole project?
  - stale2002 10y ago
    The reality is that Adapative Cruise Control and Lane assist is good enough for 90% of driving. Let computers handle the boring parts of driving, and send the hard stuff over to the human when it needs to. That is a lot of gains that we could be running right NOW on the streets.
    - slavik81 10y ago
      What exactly will humans be doing while the computer handles the boring parts of driving? If the answer is 'supervising', that sounds even more boring than actually driving.
devnonymous 10y ago
...and in addition, the attitude evident in the closed issues is more like -- "Here community clean this mess up for us, just don't ask us to give you anything functional, we have a company to run, you see -- at least this bit is free" ...meh, pass.
ceejay 10y ago
It appears, from the article, that they're working on a shoestring budget. My initial impression was that adding at least one full-time specialist, maybe more, simply to dot the i's, cross the t's for NHTSA, plus purchasing (or renting) infrastructure to do all the required tests could probably easily bankrupt the project in its current state. My guess is sometimes it's probably ok to decide a project is not yet in a position (financially or structurally) to take on the additional responsibility of dealing with an enormous bureaucracy such as the US govt. And if that means you have to give your product away in order to do so, that's a calculated risk you might feel you have to take. I seriously doubt that when NHTSA contacted them they were like, "just invite us into your building and show us around", like a health code inspector might.

by AmVess 10y ago

wyager 10y ago

> yet he ran away the moment NHTSA looked into his project To be fair, this could have nothing to do with the quality of the project. I don't want anything to do with the NHTSA (or any other government regulatory body) if I can help it.

Oletros 10y ago
> To be fair, this could have nothing to do with the quality of the project To be fair, looking at the code, it has all to do with the quality of the project
- cleeus 10y ago
  Do you happen to know where the code is? Can you post a link?
  - LukeB_UK 10y ago
    https://github.com/commaai/openpilot https://github.com/commaai/openpilot
    - cleeus 10y ago
      doesn't look to bad except: - I can't find automated tests - The vision module is a binary blob (of course this was also stated in the previous HN discussion) The rest is basically just a bunch of glue and bootloader code.
  - Oletros 10y ago
    Ninjaed by LukeB Here there is a discussion about the github repo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13073331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13073331
redthrowaway 10y ago
>I don't want anything to do with the NHTSA (or any other government regulatory body) if I can help it. Great, so don't make software for self-driving cars.
- wyager 10y ago
  Well, I would just do what this guy is doing and make the software available for free. This is preferable to never making the software at all. If the NHTSA manages to put a chilling effect on open AI research, that's a great example of government regulation indirectly hurting a lot more than it helps.
icebraining 10y ago
So you're saying he may have been convinced he could make a self-driving car in the US and avoid dealing with the regulatory bodies? Sounds like your opinion of him is even worse than the above.

captainmuon 10y ago

I could imagine NHTSA was pressing him too early for his taste. I don't know Hotz personally, so I can just guess his motives, but if it was me I might react in the same way. After all, this is basically still a hobby project (although announced like a product and made by a very clever guy). Who knows if he even has the money and time to implement NHTSA's demands?

akerl_ 10y ago
It doesn't seem like a hobby project given he accepted VC funding for it.
Jarwain 10y ago
The NHTSA seemed to only request for comma.ai to push back a release date until further testing happened. As for the money >Well, we have Andreesen Horowitz [the VC firm], which provided $3.1 million, and we spent under $1 million to do all of this.
- trymas 10y ago
  I am interested where's the profit behind this funding, if it's given away? Or the funding is just to buy the person/people/team to make some innovative products or work in some other self driving car research teams?
  - usrusr 10y ago
    The experience won while writing that code could be a lot more valuable than the code itself. If ever a car company was interested in building on top of what comma.ai has done so far, they would hire (or acqui-hire, that's the VC bet) the heads and have them rewrite the code together with more formal engineers. But when nobody is buying comma.ai, nothing of that will happen. The (little, given the domain) money invested will only have been sponsorship of a romanticized take on hacker culture. Which may actually have been a contributing factor in the investment decision here, this a frugal garage operation, not a fast-burning startup with fancy offices. Open sourcing some code can create visibility, without it we would not be talking about this today. From the investment perspective, opening this code is clearly a hail-mary-pass. There are situations when those are the best course of action and I think this is one of them.

ttflee 10y ago

By bs, do you mean poor practices like the one in throttle control system for Toyota Camry (which NHTSA/NASA failed to detect)? http://www.embedded.com/electronics-news/4423365/Toyota-Camry-L4-case--the-single-bit-flip-that-killed http://www.embedded.com/electronics-news/4423365/Toyota-Camr... http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer-firmware--Bad-design-and-its-consequences http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer...

argonaut 10y ago
If accurate this would be evidence that the NHTSA isn't very stringent, which would actually make Hotz's self driving project seem even worse.
- pjc50 10y ago
  The poor practices at Toyota are true (as in "established as fact in a court"). The NHTSA are indeed not very stringent as they don't really pro-actively audit systems, they rely on compliance documentation.
  - seren 10y ago
    I believe this is how every regulatory agency works over the world, they don't do any tests on your products, you only submit documentation related to your development and tests. They are basically looking for proof that you did required things such as specifications, tests, risks management... They are looking into your development process to estimate if your product is safe or not. But this is only indirect. Until you actually kill someone, and then, the same agency will send you its investigators and auditors.
    - pjc50 10y ago
      I thought FCC approval required lab testing by an approved lab, while for CE self-certification is acceptable? UL actually do testing, although they're not exactly a regulatory agency.

iiiggglll 10y ago

This whole thing is ridiculous. It only works because it piggybacks on the hard work of engineers at major manufacturers who put front-facing radar into their vehicles, plus a little bit of image recognition based lane keeping running on a smartphone. It's not "self-driving". It's time to put this sort of thing into perspective: it's Yet Another Half-Baked Level 2 Automation System (YAHBL2AS ?).[1] The world doesn't need another one of those. There's nothing new here. For reference, there's a comment elsewhere in this very HN thread from someone who said they did image recognition based lane keeping as a university project, and they said they did it 10 years ago using Matlab. If there is going to be a new AI "winter" (and I'm starting to think that's more and more likely every day), it will probably be the result of too much hype around overblown ego-driven claims such as this. Hotz is probably doing more harm than good at this point. [1] http://www.sae.org/misc/pdfs/automated_driving.pdf http://www.sae.org/misc/pdfs/automated_driving.pdf

ainiriand 10y ago
I agree with you in some aspects but in the project description it is not mentioned the "self-driving" part, and I quote: 'Currently it performs the functions of Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and Lane Keeping Assist System (LKAS)'. This I can believe is performed, at some degree. Do you think the media can be overinflating the whole project?
- stale2002 10y ago
  The reality is that Adapative Cruise Control and Lane assist is good enough for 90% of driving. Let computers handle the boring parts of driving, and send the hard stuff over to the human when it needs to. That is a lot of gains that we could be running right NOW on the streets.
  - slavik81 10y ago
    What exactly will humans be doing while the computer handles the boring parts of driving? If the answer is 'supervising', that sounds even more boring than actually driving.

devnonymous 10y ago

...and in addition, the attitude evident in the closed issues is more like -- "Here community clean this mess up for us, just don't ask us to give you anything functional, we have a company to run, you see -- at least this bit is free" ...meh, pass.

ceejay 10y ago

It appears, from the article, that they're working on a shoestring budget. My initial impression was that adding at least one full-time specialist, maybe more, simply to dot the i's, cross the t's for NHTSA, plus purchasing (or renting) infrastructure to do all the required tests could probably easily bankrupt the project in its current state. My guess is sometimes it's probably ok to decide a project is not yet in a position (financially or structurally) to take on the additional responsibility of dealing with an enormous bureaucracy such as the US govt. And if that means you have to give your product away in order to do so, that's a calculated risk you might feel you have to take. I seriously doubt that when NHTSA contacted them they were like, "just invite us into your building and show us around", like a health code inspector might.