Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Autopilot on Cars for $999

comma.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 298 posts

Re: Autopilot on Cars for $999

#191

Post by camjohnson26 »

luplex wrote: post #176
tjoff wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "with you also paying attention." So no guarantees whatsoever then. Because you are always responsible and are always expected to recover from anything the autopilot might ever come up with. Teslas do fail in deadly ways. Everyone that cares to look knows this. Yet Tesla is fine with it, even while knowing that humans can't reason about safety when the car drives perfectly the other 99% of times.

Tesla guarantees that an attentive driver can safely take control. Comma does not.

They don’t guarantee it they just provide a disclaimer. There’s plenty of driver monitoring solutions they could provide but don’t. Combine that with deeply unethical promises of full self driving coming just around the corner, feature complete by 2020, fully autonomous road trip by 2017, and you’re left with a dangerous product and customers that overestimate its abilities.

Re: Autopilot on Cars for $999

#193

Post by bpicolo »

gkop wrote: post #170
crazypython wrote: post #97

If self-driving companies really believed in their product, they would bundle car insurance that only works when self-driving is on with the product, and it would be cheaper than normal car insurance.

In fact we have the opposite, where MetroMile advertises lower premiums, while conveniently occupying your ODB2 port, without providing pass-through, preventing the use of Comma’s product (this honestly makes me consider switching from Geico to MetroMile, so I’m not subsidizing Comma customers, but there are other issues with MetroMile...).

> so I’m not subsidizing Comma customers

Is this a thing outside of a tiny subset of hackerspace?

Re: Autopilot on Cars for $999

#194

Post by bko »

coddle-hark wrote: post #189
bko wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool. Now do Volvo Pilot Assist. Comma.ai is trying to do big things and I hope they succeed. No reason self-driving technology should be bundled with a car and I have little faith in auto manufacturers to deliver. Lane assist technology exists. Look at consumer reports for a comprehensive review [0] (comma.ai was #1 in lane assist, above even tesla). They are open about their mistakes, issues and tradeoffs, much mor…

> They are open about their mistakes, issues and tradeoffs, much more so than other companies. I don't think its right for engineers use this as a cudgel to beat them over the head. This openness gives us consumers an opportunity to look under the hood and evaluate the tech for what it is, which is a good thing and should be applauded. However. I’ve used that freedom to look at their code and processes and I’ve decid…

I'm honestly curious why you trust Volvo more.

They're completely opaque. There's no issue board, can't even find a terms of service online. No over the air updates. Can't even find a technical manual or version number of the software you're running. I assume you just have some car salesman point you to the button to press. Independent reviews put open pilot much higher than Volvo despite volvo having much more reach and influence in the industry

Like I've said elsewhere, they have a very loyal user base, probably driven more miles than the others combined, lots of discussion online and are more open by a mile. They even store the raw video to train, not just feature vectors.

To me this is all signs that their product is relatively strong. And I'd be willing to bet their processes and standards are much better than big auto.

Re: Autopilot on Cars for $999

#195

Post by bri3d »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #178
bri3d wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they intercept whichever CAN bus in the target vehicle is used to send Adaptive Cruise Control and Automatic Lane Keeping messages, and send their own instead. On many target cars, they actually simply use the stock Adaptive Cruise Control and openpilot provides only the steering (ALK).

Seems like it could have disastrous results if the OEM components start talking on the bus, sharing a completely different state.

This is generally handled in one of three ways:

* Filtering the OEM messages to prevent them from reaching their destinations, which can be accomplished if Comma hardware is installed in the correct place in the bus to function as a two-ended "gateway" / "relay." Of course, then if the hardware or forwarding software fails, something else breaks...

* Relying on the end-user disabling the OEM feature which could conflict with Comma, and signaling an error state if they do.

* Relying on factory sequential integrity checking to overwrite factory messages by beating them in a timing race, causing the Comma messages to be "valid" and the factory messages "invalid" (no joke!).

* Just "spamming" the message so it's received more often than the OEM ones.

As you can tell, this is not a trustworthy safety product by any stretch of anyone's imagination.

Re: Autopilot on Cars for $999

#196

Post by kelnos »

madamelic wrote: post #33
tdeck wrote: post #4

Anyone know if this has killed someone yet?

Human life is sacred. Absolutely. but. If we are concerned with cars killing people, we should get rid of cars. This FUD around self-driving == killing people will, in the long-term, cause more deaths than the handful of sensationalized stories about self-driving deaths. The only reason those car crashes get national attention is because they were self-driving. In every other way they are boring. Bicyclists hit by ca…

If they can prove fewer crashes/deaths with their system than with human drivers, then perhaps they'll have something. But with only 35 million miles driven, they don't have enough data to prove much of anything.

Re: Autopilot on Cars for $999

#197

Post by bko »

Miraste wrote: post #184
bko wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool. Now do Volvo Pilot Assist. Comma.ai is trying to do big things and I hope they succeed. No reason self-driving technology should be bundled with a car and I have little faith in auto manufacturers to deliver. Lane assist technology exists. Look at consumer reports for a comprehensive review [0] (comma.ai was #1 in lane assist, above even tesla). They are open about their mistakes, issues and tradeoffs, much mor…

> No reason self-driving technology should be bundled with a car It seems to me that there are many reasons it should be bundled, and I'll bet that in the long run all self-driving cars will be integrated systems. It's not a good place for inconsistent installations or a modding mentality--imagine multiplying Uber and Tesla's programs a thousandfold with fewer resources and less accountability.

I disagree. I think if there's a clean uniform interface in which a device can receive video and make commands it could work out. Consider the fact that no auto maker I've seen, apart from Tesla, has made an infotainment system equivalent to a first generation iPad. I know its trendy to hate on infotainment, but I just want to see a map w/ directions to where I'm going. They're a lost cause in my opinion, and the less they do on the software front, the better.

Automakers gave up on that and now include android and apple car play as a feature. So I imagine they'll eventually give up and outsource things like lane assist, which are considerably more difficult

Re: Autopilot on Cars for $999

#198

Post by newsclues »

mmglr wrote: post #154
chairmanwow1 wrote: post #3

I bought my car with the express intent of getting a compatible car for Comma. My comma absolutely increased the utility of my car to me. Been on 3 huge road trips that I wouldn’t have considered without the device. 12 hours on the road isn’t something I would do everyday, but absolutely bearable with a comma.

If anything it sounds to me as if the comma provided a false sense of security. Drawing from experience driving 9 hours is already grueling. At hour 10, 11 or 12 would you have been able to take control during a failure of the system?

I drove 10-12h per day across Canada without cruise control let alone any drivers aid.

If you have no option, you just get it done.

Re: Autopilot on Cars for $999

#199

Post by azinman2 »

wpietri wrote: post #74
jeremycarter wrote: post #62

Not sure I'm so keen on Python driving my car. I've looked through some of the code and I think for me to buy into the safety the quality of the code would need to be improved, well commented, and audited.

It's not python I'm worried about here.

It’s probably the best engineered and most reliable part!

Re: Autopilot on Cars for $999

#200

Post by PragmaticPulp »

bko wrote: post #166
coddle-hark wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latest commit in the repo [0] right now is "should work" (34ff295). Filtering by "bug" in the issue tracker gives: Comma two freeze and reboot while engaged . I recently had an incident on the interstate where my comma two froze completely (while engaged) and rebooted. The video froze, Comma's steering torque turned off, then after about five seconds in this state, the device rebooted. Zygote restarting while OP…

Cool. Now do Volvo Pilot Assist. Comma.ai is trying to do big things and I hope they succeed. No reason self-driving technology should be bundled with a car and I have little faith in auto manufacturers to deliver. Lane assist technology exists. Look at consumer reports for a comprehensive review [0] (comma.ai was #1 in lane assist, above even tesla). They are open about their mistakes, issues and tradeoffs, much mor…

> No reason self-driving technology should be bundled with a car

Aftermarket self-driving is inherently a compromise.

OEMs can design the car for their self-driving system. They can place sensors in the right places, size the actuators appropriately, and integrate vehicle dynamics data into the system.

OEMs can also properly safely test the entire system, operating as a unit, as it would operate on the road.

OEMs also leverage economies of scale to make the best technologies available at reasonable prices. Automaker net profit is on the order of 10%, and their scale is massive. You're getting a lot of bang for your buck.

Aftermarket systems are inherently a compromise. They're limited to whatever sensors can be easily mounted in the aftermarket device. The device is only mounted where convenient. The device can't take advantage of vehicle-specific sensors or actuators or vehicle dynamics data because they need to keep it generic.

And most importantly, aftermarket self-driving device manufacturers obviously aren't safety testing the device in combination with every single car on the road. They expect their users to just sort of wing it and see how it goes.

I think it's cool that Comma is working on this, but it's not going to replace OEM solutions any time soon.

> Look at consumer reports for a comprehensive review [0] (comma.ai was #1 in lane assist, above even tesla).

The report shows Tesla's system was more capable and performed better. Comma tied with 3 other manufacturers for performance.

The advantage of the Comma system was supposedly in the fact that it keeps drivers the most engaged. Kudos to Comma for that, but it's not exactly accurate to say that Comma's lane assist performance beats Tesla.

Post reply on HN