121–130 of 498 posts
It appears Hotz will now deploy his system in China, where the regulations on such devices are surely more lax. Looks like a good move for extended testing without pesky government scrutiny.
If it doesn't work the US might be a better place to mess up than China.
He's currently throwing a temper tantrum on Twitter, and all because the NHTSA wanted to ask him a few questions about the product (you can see it here: https://www.scribd.com/document/329218929/2016-10-27-Special... ). Like, how dare the government try to have basic standards for multi-ton hunks of metal hurtling down the highway without human input. I've been trying to convince people lately that Silicon Valley isn…
Come on... Hotz doesn't really represent anyone but George Hotz. He is a very unique individual that was blessed with a very mathematical mind but very little social grace.
Wow. If he really moves his project to China to take advantage of a lax regulatory environment even though he couldn't pass the scrutiny in the US, he's being very immoral and cavalier about people's lives in China. I don't understand how a startup like Cruise can get past this regulatory hurlde in the US but Hotz can't.
It will be fun when he realizes the lack of road markings and overall road quality/traffic mess in China makes it much harder than driving in your avg. US road (especially in California)
Here in North Texas I just took a weird exchange between two major highways (I-30E to Loop 12N) and at night, poorly marked lanes, very aggressive exit/entry points, and the first thought that popped into my head was "There's no way a Tesla autopilot - or anything - on the market today could navigate this at posted speed even in ideal conditions."
I'm sure it's a bit over-the-top of me to come up with such useless tests, but I love driving and wish there was as much emphasis on actual driver education as there is on innovating driver-less vehicles.
Something seems fishy to me. Cruise which GM bought for $1B a few months back was working on similar tech. Having only raised $3M he could have EASILY sold his tech/team to Chrysler or Ford or Hyundai, or any other car company for $100M and made his investors super happy and himself very rich. So why "quit" when the feds ask you to deal with regulations that involve passenger safety. Its not like he had to spend $20M…
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They could have asked for George's middle name and the cost of compliance would be burdensome. It is not the rap but the ride that you can't beat.
> It is not the rap but the ride that you can't beat. I think that's the reason he's bailing - he doesn't have the lawyer crew, he doesn't want to play the law game - he just wants to create things.
Turning a risk analysis into a deliverable suitable for interfacing with federal regulatory bodies is actually fairly easy. You're just generating a report on engineering work you already did. It's only hard if you want to get away with not mitigating risks (or high levels of residual risk). Because if you document the risk, it serves as proof the engineering team knew about the risk when the product was brought to market.
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I tweeted a joke yesterday that the Engineering Society had changed it's slogan to 'Move fast and kill people', I'm pretty happy that NHTSA has its feet solidly planted on terra firma and requires a bit of process around releasing something as important as self driving vehicles. The more software becomes mission critical the more we will need level headedness and quality rather than tantrums.
Not mission critical, rather life critical. I've worked on several life critical systems as a security researcher, helping to develop controls in tightly controlled environments to keep people safe. Work on software controlled switches in industrial machines mostly. As I've followed these developments and those of Google and Tesla I've been wondering at times if I live in some alternate universe. The level of diligen…
I like Tesla's and what Elon's accomplished has been impressive but he seems hellbent on "winning the race" to release a self driving car and that worries me.
Do I think Hotz has a viable product? Yes. (A comment over at Jalopnik linked to a Tweet where an actual human rider / journalist experienced the Hotz vehicle and was quite impressed) Do I think there's significant political pressure to have his product, ahem, driven into the ground as to not be a viable competitor to larger firms? Yes. Do I think it's a sign of immaturity to pack up your stuff and leave when confron…
> Do I think Hotz has a viable product? Yes. (A comment over at Jalopnik linked to a Tweet where an actual human rider / journalist experienced the Hotz vehicle and was quite impressed) Journalists being shown demos in controlled circumstances are a notoriously unreliable source of information about the viability of a product.
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Wow. I guess the first thing I'd do is file a FOIA request to see any Special Orders they may have sent to Apple, Uber, Google, Tesla, GM, Ford, Mercedes Benz, Volkswagen, Audi, Nissan, Toyota, BMW, and Volvo, and for copies of any documentation received from those companies that would be responsive to the demands in their own order or the order to comma.ai . Then I'd also request an extension in the time to respond…
How is that going to help him? You think the odds are that a company like Nissan has less documentation than he has? Also: secret commercial information is exempt from FOIA.
The commercial info is not necessary. They need to learn and follow the forms and protocols, and at least pretend to to be respectful when kissing the ring. If GeoHotz ran a restaurant, I wouldn't want him to be the one talking to the health inspector, either. He has the wrong personality for it. You really want the schmooziest suck-up in the company to do that stuff.
I fully expect that all the companies with compliance departments have reams and bales of responsive documentation. As comma.ai appears to be clueless with respect to regulators, the more sample material that they can look at to crib the correct answers, the less likely it is that regulators would summarily drop the axe rather than try to work with them in a reasonable manner.
He's currently throwing a temper tantrum on Twitter, and all because the NHTSA wanted to ask him a few questions about the product (you can see it here: https://www.scribd.com/document/329218929/2016-10-27-Special... ). Like, how dare the government try to have basic standards for multi-ton hunks of metal hurtling down the highway without human input. I've been trying to convince people lately that Silicon Valley isn…
[1] http://www.nhtsa.gov/Research/Vehicle-Research-&-Testing-(VR...
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Exactly. The NHTSA memo seems extremely reasonable to me. If you're going to put to market a product where the smallest malfunction could easily kill many people (both those using your product and those around them), answering a couple regulation questions seems like a small hurdle to pass. Nothing here is saying "we want to shut you down", it's saying "we want to make sure you pass the most basic safety standards".…
I feel $21,000 fine per day sounds pretty like "we want to shut you down". He never presented comma.ai as an autopilot but as a very smart line assist and adaptive cruise control.
Edit: grammar