I think the author is guilty of exactly what he’s accusing everyone else of. The major car companies are delivering relatively high quality products at scale (we have decent certainty it’s high quality because the presence of many of these driver assist features correlate with reduced accidents). And they’re rolling out slowly without a ton of stories of cars going haywire and flying off the road. And of course certain cars will only have certain features (addressing his Ford complaint) because those features require the correct mix of sensors and compute that is not yet present on every vehicle. That’s how technology that can affect personal safety should be rolled out. Slowly, carefully, and very boringly.
Releasing “alpha” level software and saying essentially “lol have fun idk” when it can significantly impact customer safety is childish, bad business, morally wrong, and something we as an industry need to move away from. It doesn’t matter if your customer base are early adopters, hackers, or open source supporters. You still owe them their safety and a reasonable and coherent privacy policy.
> And they’re rolling out slowly without a ton of stories of cars going haywire and flying off the road.
Automakers and Comma are operating at completely different scales. Orders of magnitude apart. You’re going to hear about more autopilot issues from major manufacturers because there are far, far more of them on the road. Comma only has a small group of loyal customers who make the leap to buy and modify their car.
Comma also incentivizes customers to keep quiet if the autopilot fails. The drivers can’t blame a multinational automaker if something goes wrong. They have to admit that they modified their car with an aftermarket device that hasn’t been safety tested. Comma even provides disclaimers that their product isn’t production ready. If it fails, the customer doesn’t have much incentive to broadcast to the world that they bought, installed, and used a product on public roads that was advertised as being not ready for prime time.
It’s false to equate Comma’s software strategy with that of major automakers. At minimum, automakers are working with safety regulators. Comma has gone to great lengths to specifically avoid dealing with anything safety related.
> Automakers and Comma are operating at completely different scales. Orders of magnitude apart.
Super Cruise has 7 million miles driven [0]. Comma has 35 million miles driven [1]
> Comma also incentivizes customers to keep quiet if the autopilot fails
How do you figure? The amount of weird hatred people have towards comma is much more than Cadillac. You can find literally hours of real life video of comma driving in cars. Professional reviewers like Consumer Reports don't have a pro comma bias. Comma doesn't have a PR guy or teams of lawyers. They're not a hundred billion dollar company. They're a dozen or so engineers. They have no influence over trade publications or blogs. I think people and reviewers would judge comma much more harshly than they would big auto.
> At minimum, automakers are working with safety regulators
> openpilot is developed in good faith to be compliant with FMVSS requirements and to follow industry standards of safety for Level 2 Driver Assistance Systems. In particular, we observe ISO26262 guidelines, including those from pertinent documents released by NHTSA. In addition, we impose strict coding guidelines (like MISRA C : 2012) on parts of openpilot that are safety relevant. We also perform software-in-the-loop, hardware-in-the-loop and in-vehicle tests before each software release. [2]
Please point me to the safety documents of the competitors.Most don't even have driver monitoring like comma.
>> Automakers and Comma are operating at completely different scales. Orders of magnitude apart.
>Super Cruise has 7 million miles driven [0]. Comma has 35 million miles driven [1]
Tesla has likely exceeded 4,000 million miles with Autopilot at this point versus Comma's 35. That certainly qualifies as "different scales" and "orders of magnitude apart".
It is also frankly bizarre that the author of this article barely even mentions Tesla while treating Cadillac and Audi as the primary competitors for Comma.
I'm the author. I agree Tesla is miles ahead, but they're not offering the same product.
Comma is comfortably level 2 self driving, essentially lane keep. They don't detect red lights or stop signs, the don't have navigation or even maps. It just keeps you going in a straight line, with or without lane markings. It's much more comparable to something like Super Cruise.
My point was that lane keep assist technology exists as features in new cars. That's the target market and that's what comma should be benchmarked against. If you have a problem with comma's safety features you should have an even bigger issue with that of the large auto makers.
Sorry if this comes off as rude, but this comment shows you don't really know what you are talking about. Tesla offers two driver assistance products. There is Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability. All Autopilot does is autosteering and adaptive cruise control[1]. The more advance stuff like detecting red lights and stop signs are part of the FSD package which needs to be purchased separately. Autopilot and Comma seem like natural fits for a direct comparison.
That's fair. I honestly didn't look into Tesla because I'm almost certain they're more advanced and a comparison would be kind of pointless. Tesla is better than comma.ai, but from what I've seen, comma.ai is at least comparable to the non-Tesla adaptive cruise control.
>> The drivers can’t blame a multinational automaker if something goes wrong. They have to admit that they modified their car with an aftermarket device that hasn’t been safety tested. Comma even provides disclaimers that their product isn’t production ready. If it fails, the customer doesn’t have much incentive to broadcast to the world that they bought, installed, and used a product on public roads that was advertised as being not ready for prime time.
Well this is just terrifying.
I'm wondering if there have been any serious accidents where a driver was using his software and got taken to court over the repercussions of the accident.
Thinking about tens of thousands of people using this software on the road is pretty scary.
The situation in say a Tesla or any other new car isn't much better under most driving rule regimes out there today. Fault for accident is virtually always the driver, regardless of whether automated or assist systems in use. This includes Tesla's Autopilot when used in the United States, you don't get to blame Tesla at least not today.
Personally, I can't wait for wider adoption of mature "assisted driving" products in the future - I find the idea of that future a lot less scary than the millions of not so great human drivers we have to deal with right now.
The biggest problem I have with Comma is that the quality of the camera installation will vary enormously between users even if we assume the software to be perfect. At least in a car certified for production you can mandate the cameras, sensors etc be attached permanently to the vehicle in relatively sound locations, vastly reduced risk of them falling off and causing a bad steering or other control input.
I didn't mean to shit on big auto and I like their features. My car has collision detection that I find pretty reliable and useful. My main complaint is what I see as the unfair attacks of comma.ai by engineers where we should be applauding his efforts and openness, especially compared to the competition.
I don't see the Ford complaint as them introducing features slowly and carefully. To me its a code smell. But my biggest complaint is that its opaque. If they had a detailed description of the features, what sensors are used and their limitations, then I would be much happier. But instead they have nothing more than a name and a trademark.
Again, the "alpha" level doesn't mean anything. Hotz is immature and some of his actions are regretful. It certainly doesn't live up to the thought and care he puts into his products. Of course, I don't know the guy but I have heard him speak for hours and was very impressed.
Why would having different features be a code smell? I would compare it more to purchasing version X or Y of photoshop, or something similar. If you buy and older or cheaper version of the software, you get a different feature set.
I can completely agree the naming and descriptions are horrendous though. I think that as more of these technologies start to provide assistance in more areas of driving, more of the time, education and transparency are nearly as important as safety. And that’s an area where every one of these projects is failing to a greater or lesser degree.
Consider BLIS (Blind Spot Information System) with Cross-Traffic Alert.
I imagine there's an engineer that created a function isBlindSpot(state, "right") as opposed to a more comprehensive system of object detection, where it'll be able to tell you if there's a blind spot but also be integral in Intersection Assist (a separate feature in the 2021 Mustang Mach-E).
Of course I could be wrong, and the features could be an interface to a more comprehensive system, but my hunch is that it's more segmented.
Releasing “alpha” level software and saying essentially “lol have fun idk” when it can significantly impact customer safety is childish, bad business, morally wrong, and something we as an industry need to move away from. It doesn’t matter if your customer base are early adopters, hackers, or open source supporters. You still owe them their safety and a reasonable and coherent privacy policy.