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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.'"
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.