
The Cancelled Comma One Would Have Embarrassed the Car Industry - devy
http://www.thedrive.com/tech/5772/the-cancelled-comma-one-would-have-embarrassed-the-car-industry
======
LeanderK
> _Hotz 's initial tweets suggested his move was in response to an inquiry
> from NHTSA, stating that he "would much rather spend life building amazing
> tech than dealing with regulators and lawyers,"_

well, this is not some stupid web-app that can't harm anyone even if it tried
(except from maybe overheating your smartphone). This can kill people, i can't
seriously buy dangerous stuff from somebody that says something like this.
What's next? Producing food without following proper hygiene regulations?
Disrupting the medicine-industry by testing your headache-pills on your
customers (those regulations are only slowing us down!)?

~~~
donmatito
You would have won so much Irony Points if only you had written "Producing
food without following proper hygiene regulations? Disrupting the medicine
industry with revolutionary tests without sufficient scientific validation?"

~~~
llukas
Let me introduce to you: Theranos

~~~
ethbro
We all got that. ;)

------
snickerbockers
I've said it before and I'll say it again: you can't apply Silicon Valley
disruption to every industry because most software has a failure-rate that
would be considered _appalling_ in any real engineering discipline.

And building a control system that can follow a perfectly black asphalt road
with bright yellow and white lines between the lanes isn't even 1% as
difficult as building a system that can actually be relied upon to safely
convey its passengers under less ideal circumstances.

~~~
jimmydddd
Reminds me of that old joke from the '80s(?) about what if MS built cars? You
would get the blue screen of death while driving on the highway, and have to
stop your car and restart it, you would get cryptic error messages when you
were running out of gas, etc....

------
kesselvon
This is a bit of weak spin on the obvious news that they _probably_ couldn't
comply with the government requirements.

~~~
tptacek
They weren't given any government requirements, with the the possible
exception of the FHMVSS rule that you can't remove the rear-view mirror of the
car. The NHTSA Special Order asked only for documentation of extremely basic
test plan stuff (road, speed, weather, and traffic limits for the device,
along with user documentation).

~~~
shadowshadow
The Special Order might be of the "we're looking for a justification to fine
you and issue a recall" type, which it looks like they often are.

~~~
tptacek
People have a lot of theories about what this letter meant, but the people on
HN who have actually worked with NHTSA orders say the order means just what it
says it means, and that NHTSA is pretty reasonable to work with.

Certainly the questions in the order --- I posted them on the first thread
about the comma one --- seemed pretty basic and reasonable.

~~~
shadowshadow
The questions were reasonable, but the cover letter was very negative.

Could you point me to comments with first hand NHTSA experience? I didn't see
any.

~~~
tptacek
The cover letter was very "do not blow off the NHTSA". One commenter who had
experience with NHTSA provided examples of orders they sent other companies
with similar language.

~~~
shadowshadow
I assume you mean this comment?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12819423](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12819423)

The listed special orders were the pretext to $70m, $35m and $105m fines.
Doesn't inspire confidence.

It might just be reporting bias, but I couldn't find an example of a special
order that wasn't associated with a massive scandal.

~~~
jacquesm
The idea is that you comply with the request, not ignore it. Those fines only
kick in if you decide to go ahead anyway.

------
noonespecial
There's 2 possible reasons.

1) It really is near vaporware just being shown off in perfect conditions to
seem exceptional.

2) It actually does work that much better with only $1000 worth of hardware
and responding would give away the secret sauce.

I don't give much credit to the theory that they didn't see this coming and
were caught flat-footed by the sudden requirements.

Oh and: _Final speculation: there’s a reason it was called the Comma One.
Where there 's a Comma One, there's likely to be a Comma Two_

I was really hoping it was actually a C64 reference, namely: "where the
'drive' goes"... ,8,1

~~~
agumonkey
I have yet to see the simplest proof that comma ai work is just a cute trained
NN over a camera, piped to basic controls, with some potential creative ideas
(in a conf, hotz mentioned working on time based depth inference instead of
the traditional stereo camera setup).

I'm biased for conservative companies, I have no idea what they're doing and
how much resources. Maybe they're doing something at the same level. I believe
they have more refined physics model to compute surroundings and car physics
in a way to ensure sane and safe behaviour. Exception made of Tesla AP, which
I always found borderline lying.

The medias and the crowd seeems to believe wild hacking and current year tech
is giving you better products, but physics are physics. I'm still waiting for
a proof of solid math, system and safety engineering there.

psedit; I forgot, I peaked at commaai github repo, the NN code is way above my
head and what I could imagine, so I have to give hotz' team that.

Some people really have magic auras.

~~~
Pica_soO
Actually all my money was on google, i expected them to drive into the
scrapfield, after the car companys and Tesla pushed each other into a early
market situation and upped Legislation, kicking themselves out of the market,
with a carnaggedon. But they backed out, because their managers want the
chicken to exist before the egg. So, why not bet on the outsider?

~~~
agumonkey
I liked Google's approach a lot. It seemed justly dimensioned, came out of
Thrun DARPA success, had years and millions of miles of testing. What's not to
love. Also G has the lever to accelerate and change tech if their old approach
is obsolete.

Sad they went silent since a year or so.

I said it in other place, including HN, I don't consider Hotz an outsider, but
mostly glorified hacker (his attitude with institutions and media don't help
me clear this impression); and I don't think hacker mentality bodes well with
this task.

~~~
sorenjan
Isn't Google's approach dependent on expensive LIDARs and high resolution 3D
maps [0], or have they changed that? I don't see that kind of system scale
well.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXylqtEQ0tk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXylqtEQ0tk)

~~~
agumonkey
I've read LIDAR cost was dropping fast, it was expensive at the time and as a
short production item; nowadays it's even small.

About the 3D mapping you're probably right, I somehow expected it not to be a
deep problem.

------
aresant
"[comma.ai} was functionally superior and theoretically safer than the ten
legacy manufacturer systems"

A journalist on record saying "theoretically safer" literally makes my hair
stand up on end.

~~~
taneq
Even better, "The system worked, sometimes better than everything on the
market."

Oh boy, I just gotta have a self-driving system for my car that can sometimes
work really well!

~~~
hash-set
80% of the time it worked every time.

------
ontoillogical
And that's how you get to walk away with your dignity intact when you can't
ship a working product on your self-inflicted insane timeline.

~~~
TeMPOraL
With your dignity intact? The guy basically lost all his credibility with this
action.

Walking away with dignity intact would be replying to NHTSA, "Dear Government,
we've found out we are unable to provide the information you asked for because
the product is nowhere near mature enough. Therefore we are officially
abandoning all public tests and sales effort, and are going back to the
drawing board until such time that we are able to get back to you with the
answers you requested."

~~~
dpark
I think he meant "ego" instead of "dignity". This is how you walk away with
your over-inflated ego intact. Behaving this way indicates that you have no
dignity.

------
Animats
We don't need another crap Level 2 system. Lane keeping plus auto braking just
isn't enough. (Crap auto braking, as with Tesla, is even worse. Four
collisions with big, obvious stationary vehicles so far.)

The NHTSA, Google, and Volvo have it right. Systems where the driver has to
back up the automation will not work in practice.

~~~
_abak_
The thing is that you evaluate "big" and "obvious" with the sensors that you
have. They obviously werent obstacles for the algo that was driving.

------
taneq
I think it's far more likely that the NHTSA was caught flat-footed by Tesla's
autopilot system, and didn't react in time, with fatal results. Now they're
seeing a scrappy startup trying to dive into the same space where multi-
billion-dollar car companies ought to fear to tread, and they've done their
best to nip it in the bud before every tom dick and harry with a webcam and a
graphics card starts trying to send their car on solo missions.

------
cameldrv
The NHTSA letter pretty clearly calls out the removal of the rear view mirror
as being a problem, and a violation of safety regulations.

------
ablation
Worth noting that Alex Roy and Hotz probably have/had a
business/working/personal relationship:

"From August 24th-27th of 2016, Roy and teammates Warren Ahner & Streetwars
founder Franz Aliquo broke the Electric & semi-Autonomous Cannonball Run
records again, driving a Tesla Model S 90D 2,877 miles from the Portofino Inn
to the Red Ball garage in 55 hours, breaking the prior record by 2 hours & 48
minutes. Tesla Autopilot was engaged 97.7% of the journey. GPS data and video
evidence was captured using both a US Fleet Tracking device, and Comma.ai's
Chffr video logging software."[0]

It would not be a leap to assume that Roy might have a vested interest in
puffing up his acquaintance. Also, Alex Roy is a "journalist" insofar as he
probably got paid to write that piece. But other than that...

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Roy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Roy)

------
iiiggglll
Remember a few weeks ago when it was a headline that the "going rate" for
talented engineers working on self-driving cars was $10 million per head?[1]
Meanwhile, comma.ai the company only got $3.1 million from a big-name
investor?[2] Yeah, don't quit your day job...

[1] [http://www.recode.net/2016/9/17/12943214/sebastian-thrun-
sel...](http://www.recode.net/2016/9/17/12943214/sebastian-thrun-self-driving-
talent-pool)

[2] [http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/04/technology/george-hotz-
comma...](http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/04/technology/george-hotz-comma-ai-
andreessen-horowitz/)

------
jacquesm
The only embarrassed entity here is George Hotz. I find it extremely hard to
come up with a charitable narrative in all this but at least the system
appears to be working: hacked together crap is not going to be sold to
consumers.

It's one thing to break other systems, it is an _entirely_ different thing to
produce safety critical software systems interacting in real time with
hardware under real world conditions and it is not a given that someone who is
good at the one will also be good at the other.

------
_abak_
I guess that being a brilliant hacker doesn't necessarily make you an
engineer.

------
6stringmerc
Hm, well the article certainly is flattering toward Hotz, the project, and the
impression (having first-hand experience with several systems does strike me
as important).

Still pretty staunchly of the opinion over here that he's got something worth
still working on and this isn't the last of it. AKA contrary to a good number
of comments which basically say he's either a fraud, huckster, or otherwise
dumb for not being interested/willing/prepared to engage with the NHTSA at
this stage.

Eh time will tell, right?

------
anentropic
> Asked if he was genuinely intimidated by NHTSA's letter, he said, "I've got
> two words for you: stealth mode."

I've got two words for you: knob end

------
empraptor
I'm wary of self-driving systems based only on cameras. He should really wait
until cheap LiDARs are available in a few years.

~~~
cameldrv
The comma only works on a few (maybe just one) Honda car that has a built-in
front facing radar that they're able to tap into. With that, comma is using
roughly the same sensor package as the V1 Tesla autopilot.

~~~
empraptor
Thanks. I didn't know Comma One also uses front facing radar. Do you happen to
know what state of the art millimeter wave radars are capable of? I found some
references from 2013 about Panasonic product with resolution of 20cm, but
maybe there are better options now?

------
g8oz
A certain type of click bait journalist has an interest in creating EEStor-
type narratives. True believers in the Magic Product keep clicking links for
months or years at a time.

------
bertiewhykovich
What this article tries its damnedest to elide is the narrative-wrecking fact
that Holtz, confronted with a standard request to demonstrate that his product
meets regulatory standards, took his ball and went home. /Exactly/ why he
threw a tantrum is anyone's guess -- but there doesn't seem to be any real
good possibility. Either his product couldn't meet standards and this is an
attempt to obfuscate that inconvenient fact, or he withdrew a working product
because he was so affronted by the fact that the NHTSA dared challenge him --
hardly a defensible, or confidence-inspiring, behavior.

~~~
stale2002
Well, maybe the reason is that these regulator requests costs tons of money to
fulfill because no, you cannot you give simple laymans answers to the
questions, you need a team of lawyers to do this work, because everything you
say in these "simple" requests can and will be used against you.

And perhaps there are better uses of their time, and better regulatory
environments where they can release their product.

Maybe in a couple months we are going to hear about the imminent release of
the Comma Two in Not-America. I seriously doubt they've gone home. There are
tons of places where they could starting selling right NOW.

America's loss, other countries' gain.

~~~
dpark
> _Maybe in a couple months we are going to hear about the imminent release of
> the Comma Two in Not-America. I seriously doubt they 've gone home. There
> are tons of places where they could starting selling right NOW._

Then I'm very thankful for the NHTSA we have in America. I don't want a bunch
of half-ass, poorly-engineered self-driving cars on our roads. I use those
roads, and so do my family members.

While I'm looking forward to self-driving cars taking over, I don't want the
Comma One in the field if they can't handle the most basic safety inquiries.

~~~
exergy
The guy that you're replying to seems to have no idea how these things work. I
worked for an automotive manufacturer in India (hardly a paragon of virtue in
terms of regulatory strictness), and we had rules about even seemingly-inane
stuff like the HVAC being able to cool the car down in a certain amount of
time, and maintain a given temperature overnight on a cold night etc.

You can't just walk in being an arrogant, know-it-all whiz kid and demand that
the rules be bent and mere mortals be forced to step aside in deference to
your superior intellect.

~~~
stale2002
Nowhere, in the ENTIRE WORLD of 7 BILLION PEOPLE could you release something
like this?

It doesn't matter if most people reject your idea, you only need a couple
cities to say "approved for preliminary testing for a limited number/couple
thousand beta testers" to go into Prod. And then when you go into prod you get
real life data and can prove that your product really is as awesome as you say
it is, THEN you go back to the countries that said no, but this time with more
money and actual facts to back you up.

This isn't some super expensive product that is out of reach for the world.
This is a thousand dollar conversion kit. If these things were available and I
owned a Honda, I would have bought it to just mess around with it instead of
buying the HTC Vive that I got last night.

I am sure there are lots of beta customers around the world who would be
interested in getting a prelim beta version.

------
maverick_iceman
The letter sent by NHTSA to Comma.ai[1]. I'm a layman but to me the penal
provisions ($21k/day up to $105M for not responding by 11/10, prison sentence
of 15 years for falsifying/withholding information) sound kinda harsh. Can
someone confirm that these conditions are standard in requests of this type?

[1]
[https://www.scribd.com/document/329218929/2016-10-27-Special...](https://www.scribd.com/document/329218929/2016-10-27-Special-
Order-Directed-to-Comma-
ai?content=10079&ad_group=Online+Tracking+Link&campaign=Skimbit%2C+Ltd.&keyword=ft500noi&source=impactradius&medium=affiliate&irgwc=1)

------
Pica_soO
Honest to Odd, could have a normal, shed-hacker fullfill these requirements?
Even if he had the money? Is there a way to shrink the requirement- like
building cars that can drive not faster then 20 mph in full automated mode?

------
jmcmahon443
I think it got cancelled because it is a real startup now.

Let me explain! Put yourself in CEO's shoes: you have employees who love
working for you but you need to get them a paycheck. From that perspective, it
is easy to see that it is kind of crazy to enter into these lengthy government
discussions that could possibly ruin your business and delay the entire
industry! No thanks!!

If they're all really engineers who just love doin' the work, they will be a
valuable contracting outfit doin' the exact same work for a steadier paycheck.

~~~
crooked-v
What? Refusing to cooperate with the government in a highly regulated industry
will 'ruin your business' anyway.

