Hacker is giving away code that makes cars self-driving
Here is a strategy for startups dealing with regulators who might shut down your product: Make it free.
Self-driving car startup Comma.ai released a free software kit this week to help developers learn to build a device that can turn any car into an autonomous vehicle. The year-old company, which is founded by a well-known hacker and backed by prominent Silicon Valley investors, hopes to accelerate the development of self-driving cars while skirting the ire of Washington.
The move raises questions of how the U.S. should foster innovation for promising technologies that also carry great risks. Experts say self-driving cars have the potential to dramatically reduce the number of accidents, most of which are caused by human errors. But Comma’s self-driving kit has only logged roughly 5,000 miles of road time, a number that is effectively a useless barometer for judging safety, said John Simpson, of the safety advocacy group Consumer Watchdog.
When Comma.ai’s founder, George Hotz, 27, announced his plan to sell a do-it-yourself self-driving software and hardware kit for $999 at a large industry conference this fall, the tech world was giddy with excitement.
Shortly after the announcement, Hotz was slapped with a warning letter from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Within hours of getting the NHTSA letter, Hotz canceled the product launch. He didn’t have the money to hire lawyers required to get government approval, he said.
He decided that a workaround would be to offer up the code to his kit — for free.
“We want to be the Android operating system for self-driving cars,” Hotz said at a news conference Wednesday, held in the company’s garage in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood. Hotz was referring to the opensource smartphone operating system, which has become ubiquitous because it is free and developers can easily innovate on it.
The code, which is available on the open-source platform GitHub, lets anyone build a dashcam-like device to be set up in a car.
Technically, Hotz’s software isn’t a fully autonomous car such as the ones being tested by Google or GM. Hotz says it is an opensource alternative to Tesla’s autopilot, which is considered semiautonomous.