
How a College Kid Made His Honda Civic Self-Driving for $700 - nichodges
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603637/how-a-college-kid-made-his-honda-civic-self-driving-for-700/
======
CaliforniaKarl
Every time I hear about stuff like this, I'm reminded of the words of Jeremy
Clarkson:

"It's a brilliant idea, designed by very smart people, but one day you know
that this will be bought by a man named Keith, and he is going to wake up one
morning and think he can service it himself. And you won’t be able to relax in
your autonomobile [sic] because you know that Keith is in his, coming the
other way."

I really hope that humanity will be able to advance fast enough, to keep up
with the advances in self-driving and assisted-driving vehicles.

~~~
adimitrov
How on earth is this worse than the current situation, where Keith is
_already_ in his, coming the other way.

Drunk.

And texting.

In other words: the amount of people currently willing and able to commit
gross negligence _while driving_ is certainly higher than the amount of people
willing and able to conduct grossly negligent repairs on their autonomous
vehicles in the future.

------
potato122
_Who needs a Tesla when you can build your own automated copilot using free
hardware designs and software available online?_

These days you can 3d print a .45, but would you really wrap your hand around
that thing and squeeze the trigger?

This is a car...

------
kbouck
> _“I am less interested in full autonomy and more in preventing rear-
> endings,” he says. “A lot of existing cars can be retrofitted.”_

Would love it if my elderly parents could enjoy such automation to assist in
avoiding minor accidents, while preserving their autonomy. They won't likely
be buying any new cars at this point. But retrofitting their existing cars
with some bump and crash avoidance functionality would be great.

------
willhallonline
I guess my main concern is that I, daily, see that a lot of software is just
about working when it is shipped. I would love to be able to program my car,
but I do wonder about the people who are running the hypothetical dev version
which still pulls to the right. Or just download something from Github and run
it.

------
throwaway2016a
I think in these articles it is important to list what level of self-driving
car this is. From the article it sounds like a 1 or a 2.

One thing articles like this do bring up is that we may be able to retrofit a
lot of existing cars which could shorten the adoption delay caused by people
keeping their cars 10+ years.

