Slashdot Mirror
Hacker George Hotz Unveils $999 Self-Driving Add-On (pcmag.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PC Magazine: Hacker George Hotz is gearing up to launch his automotive AI start-up's first official product. In December, the 26-year-old -- known for infiltrating Apple's iPhone and Sony's PlayStation 3J -- moved on to bigger things: turning a 2016 Acura ILX into an autonomous vehicle. According to Bloomberg, Hotz outfitted the car with a laser-based radar (lidar) system, a camera, a 21.5-inch screen, a "tangle of electronics," and a joystick attached to a wooden board. Nine months later, the famed hacker this week unveiled the Comma One. As described by TechCrunch, the $999 add-on comes with a $24 monthly subscription fee for software that can pilot a car for miles without a driver touching the wheel, brake, or gas. But unlike systems currently under development by Google, Tesla, and nearly every major vehicle manufacturer, Comma.ai's "shippable" Comma One does not require users to buy a new car. "It's fully functional. It's about on par with Tesla Autopilot," Hotz said during this week's TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.
The price is possible because it is not a complete system; per TFA they are using (some might say leveraging) onboard radar. That means that unless your car already has a sufficiently useful radar (e.g. it has adaptive cruise control and/or automatic emergency braking) you're not going to be able to retrofit at least the first generation of this system without taking heroic steps.
That's a shame, because it would be really nice to be able to put this into some of the vehicles made in the late nineties, after basic vehicle technology approached the current state of the art but before practically every car sprouted a remotely hackable infotainment system.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
come on .. you know this thing is just being driven by some guy in India working in a call center :o)
Between Eric Bachman's hype and Gilfoyle's latent satanic easter eggs I think I'll wait to see if this actually works. But it's nice to see them beating Hooli.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
At this point i'm almost convinced that it was a fake wiki edit because i've never been able to find any pictures anyone else have any better luck?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
What's with the terrible name? This guy nerds marketing assistance..
I got a '75 Monte Carlo that I've been restoring and I look forward to making it self-driving so I can send it to get me a fucking gelato, a fifth of Johnny Walker and a carton of Chesterfields.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Does he indemnify the users in case his tech screws up and kills someone?
Going cheap can get very, very, VERY expensive, very quickly.
$999 for a homing missile they can load up with petrol and drive into a civic center.
GeoHotz isn't a hacker, he's a hack. Stay far away.
I wonder if he's figured out he's going to need this? He can have people sign releases of liability and hold harmlesses till hell freezes over, it won't stop people from suing him.
So once this thing kills a few people, poor ol' Georgie will wish he was in a coma like his last customer.
Without deep pockets like the major corporations that are his competitors, he will be in a financial coma in no time. Hackers are not know for having much forethought. Witness the kid who just revealed his T-Mobile hack. (There is an article on /. about it.) Georgie will be in the 'Hotz Seat' of his hobby car in no time. It was destined to be.
Even if I wanted something like this - "Monthly fee" = "Piss Off"
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
I think he misspelled coma, as in what you will be in after using this system ;-)
Looks like I'm not going to be able to kill anyone with this. I have a manual transmission.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
This looks like a money making opportunity! No, not from selling conversion kits for "self driving" cars, but an opportunity to short some insurance company stocks for that day in the near future when they start to hemorrhage money to settle claims related to accidents caused by "self driving" cars. This is going to be one fantastic disaster.
So it's not a self-driving car. But no surprise here, if Google and other megacorporations cannot do it yet, I doubt a boy in his basement can.
Unless the thingy is 98%+ safe it _is_ 100% crap for normal purposes.
"98%+ safe" is incredibly unsafe for an automobile presuming you are using any reasonably standard measure of safety like deaths per 100 million miles traveled. That means that it would get into an accident once every 50 miles! For reference current human driven vehicles in the US experience 1.13 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. That is 99.99999998% safe by that measurement. Any automated driving system will have to beat that number and beat it by a lot.
People tend to think that saying something is 99% successful is a good thing but in reality that can be a terrible outcome. A vehicle that was 98% safe under any reasonable measurement would be immediately and rightly labeled a death trap.
No because the driver is supposed to remain alert and watching the road and so remains responsible.
That is NOT how product liability works. He would be liable for any reasonably foreseeable use of the product and even for negative outcomes he could not foresee. It may not matter at all if he warns the passenger to remain alert. Most likely any case would be held to the strict liability standard which means intent to harm is irrelevant.
Fuck you and your subscription software model!
You mean the one that slammed into a slow-moving orange truck.
As reported by TechCrunch; how appropriate.
really? whats next microtransactions at each intersection to perform the turns you need?
..when people buy this piece of crap and kill themselves in an auto accident. Too bad innocent bystanders and motorists will also be killed.
... that were made to help defend him from Sony regarding his hack that resulted in the removal of otherOS from PS/3.
Instead the case was dropped.
Where's my $20?
I respect geohotz, but I don't think a 26-year old kid completely grasps the ramifications of building and shipping a technology whose goal is arguably to "kill fewer people". Even if he does kill fewer people, people are going to die using this or any autonomous driving platform. Is he ready to deal with the fallout from that? Also, we won't know until millions or hundreds of millions of miles have been driven how the technology compares in terms of safety to human drivers. It sounds like he's using low-end electronics, so chances are he's just banking on deep learning solving all the driving problems. This is a very, very dangerous approach to take, when deep learning has a strong tendency to exhibit pathological failure cases (see "adversarial nets"), and when it's usually impossible to fully understand, explain, justify or characterize the strengths and weaknesses of a network trained on a given task.