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Comma.ai Shelves Self-Driving Device After Regulatory Warning (reuters.com)
Comma.ai founder George Hotz, who has spent the good part of his past year criticizing competitors and their technologies, sent out a series of tweets Friday, saying that Comma.ai, a startup that aimed at offering semi-autonomous driving system, will be pulling out of the U.S. market in response to requests from federal regulators. From a Reuters report: The intervention, by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, came before Comma.ai began marketing its device. It is the latest signal that regulators want more control over the development and deployment of self-driving vehicle systems by vehicle manufacturers and suppliers, after a period in which they took a largely hands-off approach. The NHTSA on Friday disclosed an Oct. 27 letter to Comma.ai stating that the agency is investigating whether the company's device, called Comma One, complies with federal regulations. The letter and an accompanying special order demanded that Comma.ai provide the agency with information about the device and warned that the agency could prohibit the sale of the system if it were found to be defective.
Is "a service of tweets" like a pride of lions or a murder of crows? Or another editor who can't F***ing write?
Beats having to make it work... I guess.
Who...???
Company and product name sounded suspiciously similar to coma...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
The letter and an accompanying special order demanded that Comma.ai provide the agency with information about the device and warned that the agency could prohibit the sale of the system if it were found to be defective.
So this "intervention" was simply a letter asking for information and a warning that the NHTSA could order the developer to pull their product if found to be defective -- that's it. So, they preemptively pulled their product from the US market. I can only assume the product was either vaporware or defective.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Is that they both write and enforce the laws. Imagine if the police could write the laws, and you have a better understanding of why federal agencies like this shouldn't exist in this form.
It's really the fault of the Congress for creating agencies like this. It allows for the creation unpopular laws and regulations without elected official ever having to take the blame.
Sometimes it absolutely stuns me how large the differences are between 'business leaders' and myself. I would have assumed from the start that the government would have to act in a way similar to what the letter specifies. In contrast, along comes George Holtz who didn't see this coming at all, and it comes at such a shock that he feels he needs to shelve his business? Seems very out of touch with reality and a functioning society to me, unless of course there is something else to the story.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
While I think that his system has merit, I don't want self-driving cars that aren't validated or tested in some way. Like, do we really want a Microsoft version?
I see that you are making a U turn. Please verify that you want to make a U turn.
I am sorry, U turns are not included in the home version of self-drive.
Would you like me to drive to Walmart so you can purchase an upgrade? (joke)
Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion. I am not authorized to speak for my company.
Most people have no idea what "information" is required when approval is required for a life critical system involving software.
A "Stall Warning Card" with a 4k ROM program required the production and submission of more than 40,000 pages of documentation. It required more than 100 times more effort to produce the paper than the software.
I suspect that once Comma.ai looked at the regulation, the standards reference and calculated the volume of documentation required to prove compliance, they decided that it was too expensive to do business in America.
This product was never going to see the light of day. If it ever had, he would spend the rest of his life fleeing from US law. They did him a favor.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I told you it was all bullshit. Stupid fanboys want to believe. LOL!
This was an unfinished and unreleased product. I think they were out of line. Enforcing that products are safe is a good thing, and I don't have a problem with the NHTSA doing that. But this level of fine (up to just over 100 million USD) seems ridiculous for a product that hasn't been completed / released. Essentially they are fining someone with an idea they are trying to explore / develop, even though that person is not selling anything yet, and may never sell anything.
Even the questions they asked seemed crazy at this point. They wanted him to describe how the user interacts with the system. The system isn't complete! It hasn't been finished. It may not even have an end user UI yet. Don't know what valuable information they thought they were going to get here. But they start by fining him $20,000 EVERY DAY! Come on. That is over the top and ridiculous.
The name is potentially problematic. If you alter the pronunciation just slightly, Comma.ai comes out sounding like "Commie".
Wait till the EU gets through with them. They'll be programming RC cars for tots.
Mohammed: Did you see Mohammed at the meeting today?
Mohammed: No, but his brother Mohammed showed up.
Mohammed: What did Mohammed talk about?
Mohammed: Mohammed introduced us to Mohammed who is also a mason!
Mohammed: A mason? No shit? How long has he been one?
Mohammed: About five years. He was referred to the local lodge by Mohammed.
Mohammed: Ah, yes, Mohammed. He has a shit ton of connections around town!
Mohammed: Yes, and our brothers, police be upon them, Mohammed and Mohammed from Egypt came, too.
Mohammed: I've been thinking of becoming a clown.
Mohammed: A clown, Mohammed, why?
Mohammed: So I can film myself being gay.
Mohammed: Oh, you.
Mohammed: So anyway, is Mohammed, Mohammed, and Mohammed coming to the next party?
Mohammed: Indeed. Mohammed was so funny last time.
Mohammed: Well it wouldn't be a party without Mohammed.
Mohammed: Yes, my friend. POLICE BE UPON THEM!
Whew. Good thing you had that disclaimer. I thought for a second you were speaking for your company! Why do people bother writing garbage like this? No one knows who you are or what your "company" is.
Take these "self driving" efforts for what they are: a PR exercise to swindle clueless investors. It is true that 90% of the problem of autonomous driving is solved. It's also true that the remaining 10% are exponentially hard and won't be solved in the next 20 years. By 10% I mean such trivial (to a human) things like driving in bad weather, or on dirty pavement, or figuring out if the object on the road is a plastic bag or a dog. These things are hard for a machine to do, exponentially so. There's a reason why fully autonomous cars are only tested in CA or on closed tracks at this point: they're fucked if it e.g. rains or snows, if there's dirt on the pavement, or even if someone repainted the road markings (the cars use the pre-recorded view of the pavement to determine the position of the vehicle within the lane).
So e.g. Google does it so that it can pretend it's about "moonshots" rather than just selling your privacy to the highest bidder -- that helps with hiring. Hotz is doing this because there's free money and fame to be had, and to be fair, it's a pretty cool garage project. Uber is doing it to pretend it's "just as good as Google", because luring engineers solely with money tends to attract the wrong kind of people.
Rather than "self driving" cars, I'd love to see a human-driven car with advanced safety features that's darn near impossible to crash or run someone over with. I'd be willing to pay $10K just for that, over and above the price of the actual car.
So-called 'self-driving vehicles' are a subject that must be approached with the utmost of caution considering that a defective system of this type could cause massive loss of human lives. Companies developing such systems must be required to at least as cautious, and preferably doubly so, than medical device or pharmaceutical manufacturers are in the testing of their products for safety.
It is true that 90% of the problem of autonomous driving is solved. It's also true that the remaining 10% are exponentially hard and won't be solved in the next 20 years.
Nice to see someone commenting on this subject that isn't so blindly enthusiastic about it that they adopt the potentially fatal 'what could possibly go wrong' attitude towards it.
Unlike so many technology products, self-driving cars have the potential to cause massive loss of human lives if they're defective or fail. Even 99% isn't close enough, it must be 100% perfect 100% of the time, or it's not safe enough.
Of course someone will now chime in with something along the lines of 'humans are not competent to drive and any machine would do a better job', but I disagree, if the human in question is one of the people whose life is at stake if the system fails, then that human being should have the right and the ability to be the final backup to the automated system. Since asking any machine to be 100% perfect 100% of the time is not attainable in the real world, then it must be made possible for a human driver to take over from the automated system at any time.
I actually disagree with 99% assertion. The relative importance of problems matters here. To succeed, this technology needs to be _substantially_ safer than humans _in all cases that matter_, not in all possible cases. That having been said, even with a relaxed problem statement like this, with today's technology this is a nearly insurmountable goal.
Most people have no idea what "information" is required when approval is required for a life critical system involving software.
You are absolutely correct. Having worked for a diagnostic medical device manufacturer for some years, I am cognizant of what the dollar cost and time required is to perform FDA qualification testing for such devices before it may be certified for sale in the United States. It's extensive and comprehensive, and we weren't even building a machine that could potentially endanger someone's life if it was defective or failed in some way. A 'self-driving' vehicle, and especially a 'driverless' vehicle has the potential to cause massive loss of human life if it is defective or fails. It's fitness for use is totally binary; it either works perfectly, or it fails completely, nothing between the two is acceptable. Meanwhile all companies attempting to develop such systems are investing many many millions of dollars. I can just imagine how much pressure they're under from their boards of directors, stockholders, and investors, to bring these products to market and start generating profits from them. Unfortunately for all of them however profits cannot come before safety in this case. If your smartphone or computer crashes that's disappointing; if a dozen people die in an accident because a self-driving car system has a flaw or an unforseen failure, then that's completely unacceptable and someone should be going to jail over it and/or paying huge amounts in settlements.
My point is that if it's not going to be 100% reliable 100% of the time then you can't have a self-driving car that has no controls for a human driver. Knowing how systems are developed and the challenges in creating such a system I can't see such a vehicle ever being allowed for public use and would certainly never set foot inside one unless I was feeling suicidal. That handful of percentage points that it can't handle means you must still be competent to manually operate a vehicle and pay attention at all times, and the vehicle must have a full set of controls for a human operator that are availble and active at all times. Of course one of my fears about technology such as this is that while humans will still be required to be competent drivers, these systems will make them lazy and their driving skills will atrophy, and when the time comes that they are needed to control the vehicle, they won't be able to do it anymore.
You can tell it is pure PR because the cars are always white and spotless. If they were doing real safety tests those cars would have some battle scars. Let's see this test: take the car up to 50 mph and blow out a front tire. Since it can't panic, the computer should be able to bring the car to a safe stop.
It is that whole CYA thing. If you can prove there was no intent then you are safe, even from the FBI.
What a load of tosh. Human drivers are nowhere near perfect, we don't stop driving. The last year where data is available, 2015, there were 35,000 vehicle deaths in the United States alone. Do you know how many collisions there were? Over 5 million, just for the United States! Yet, your argument is that a computer driver must be "100% perfect 100% of the time, or it's not safe enough." It doesn't appear you have a strong grasp or even a basic understanding of how awful humans are at driving.
The only way your comment makes any sense is if you are part of a truck driver's union or otherwise stand to lose financially as computer driven vehicles start appearing on our roads and highways.
Google actually did research on this. They've found that, counterintuitively, it's dangerous to have a "mostly" autonomous car that can yield to a human driver at any moment. People tend to underestimate how much context they're holding in their head as they are driving. Acquiring that context at a moment's notice is just not really possible, so people tend to make stupid decisions if they weren't already paying attention. So it has to be either 100% hands free, or it'll have to be sold as a glorified driver safety system. That's why the cute little self driving cars that Google uses on its campus don't have a steering wheel at all.
But I maintain that it's suicidal to get into a 'self driving car' that has no way for you to control it, and I know for a fact that I'm far, far from being alone in that. You won't be able to sell the public on a so-called 'self-driving car' that has no way for them to control it with their own two hands and own two feet, and they won't be satisfied with some sort of voice control, or even a big red 'Emergency Stop' button. It'll have to be a 'glorified driver safety system', then, and I think the vast majority of people will be perfectly fine with that. Besides which there will always be circumstances where an automated system just can't cope, and for those situations there has to be manual controls so a human being can maneuver the vehicle, and video game controls or some sort of keypad just isn't going to cut it, either. It needs to be the same traditional controls we've had all along. So it may as well be a sophisticated 'cruise control' feature that also happens to help keep you from getting in collisions or veering off the road. Also realize that where in 5 to 10 years you might be able to buy a vehicle with some system like this, it's only going to be on high-end luxury cars as an expensive option, not on your average everyday economy car that the vast majority of people can afford. There's no government mandate or law you can trot out, outlawing manually driven vehicles, that would ever make it into law; you're not going to tell 200,000,000 Americans that they have to throw their cars away and buy an expensive new one whether they like it or not. At best you're looking at 20 to 30 years before this makes it into the mainstream, and that's being very liberal in my estimate. In the meantime people will still drive their own cars. I'd recommend we institute reforms in driver education and training to improve driver competency in the meantime, things I've heard about how they train new drivers now makes me wonder what they're thinking.
Shut up, faggot. Just because you're a shit driver with a bunch of DUIs on your record and are not allowed to drive anymore, doesn't mean you get to promote shitty technology that will take away OUR right to drive. STFU and go take your bus to work, loser.
Why are you so angry, Rick Schumann?