[slg]

>THIS IS ALPHA QUALITY SOFTWARE FOR RESEARCH PURPOSES ONLY. THIS IS NOT A PRODUCT.

It is weird that one of the only things I see above the fold on the company's home page is a "Buy Now" button considering they don't actually sell "a product".

[gonehome]

Yeah - I don't think this would hold up, you can't really have it both ways.

Either you're selling something and taking some responsibility for certain failures, or it's research that you don't want people to use on the road.

This comes across as them selling a product they know could fail in dangerous ways, but they don't want to be responsible for any of it.

Basically, "don't use this on the road" wink wink, but we have millions of miles driven on it and obviously expect you to do so.

I'd think they'd be better off with some sort of honest policy around this that they could actually defend, but I am not a lawyer.

[parsimo2010]

I think their distinction is that they’re selling the hardware, which is capable of controlling the car just fine. So the thing you’re paying for is delivering as promised. The software is a separate project, and you could theoretically load whatever software on the hardware you wanted. So the fact that the software is glitchy is not (in the view of the company) something you can hold them responsible for. You paid for hardware, you got hardware. What you do with it is up to you.

This is at least what I remember from a years old Wired article when the comma one was being developed.

Whether that will actually hold up in court is TBD, considering how closely coupled the software is to the company and hardware.

[Piskvorrr]

Sure. You can load any software you want on that, so it's actually for playing DOOM on your car's entertainment system, and it has absolutely no relation to the demos on their pages.

IANAL, but "the dog ate my steering wheel" would be a more plausible defense.

[Closi]

It’s because the standard product doesn’t have autopilot, they sell a driver assistance tool. The tool they sell does not have autopilot.

The device is open, and you can flash with their open source code from GitHub to give you hacky autopilot. This is how they get around the legal issue.

It’s like a “we sell you a legal product. We advise you don’t flash this code on it which we are hosting on GitHub wink wink”

[Pasorrijer]

Reminds me of university. "No officer, we weren't selling tickets to the keg, we'd need a license to sell booze. We're only selling cups for $5, the beer is free!"

[Closi]

This appears to be the strategy. In the U.K. they used to sell legal highs in tablets marked as “do not eat - plant food” since technically they weren’t safe for human consumption. That’s effectively the same too!

[cortesoft]

Curious to see if a court would buy that argument.

[buran77]

> Yeah - I don't think this would hold up, you can't really have it both ways.

I don't think they would have any legal problems due to this. They sell it but clearly label it as experimental, for research only, and urge buyers to comply with local regulation. And the law pretty much everywhere states that the driver is responsible for driving the car and for the outcomes of any modification brought to the car that was not pass homologation.

Tesla is a real example that passed this test. Their marketing language brands AP as "fully self driving, some features unavailable due to local laws". The "wink wink" may be obvious for the buyer but not in the eyes of the law. Letting the car drive itself is the driver's failure, not Tesla's. Tesla can at most be held responsible for misleading advertisement and ordered not to use specific language (as it actually happened).

[gonehome]

> "Tesla is a real example that passed this test. Their marketing language brands AP as "fully self driving, some features unavailable due to local laws"."

This isn't true, FSD has always been a 'coming soon' feature you can prepay for distinct from autopilot. Autopilot has always been advanced lane assist. "Autopilot" in planes just holds the same flight pattern and doesn't really do anything sophisticated, autopilot in Tesla is similar.

[buran77]

German authorities did find Tesla's claims about the AP as misleading [0]. Tesla's AP page was updated (globally) to reflect "full self driving in the future" but until recently it just said "Tesla cars come equipped with all the necessary hardware for full self driving" with a footer claiming some features are unavailable due to local laws.

Regardless, Tesla was not found guilty for anything other than misleading advertisement, not for failing to build a car that drives itself. I don't see how comma.ai could be held to a higher standard.

> The court, in Munich, said: "By using the term 'autopilot' and other wording, the defendant suggests that their vehicles are technically able to drive completely autonomously." [0]

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53418069

[gonehome]

I don't agree, but I know this is a position a reasonable person could hold.

I just don't think autopilot means autonomous driving and I think that's clear to people.

If someone thinks cruise control means you can crawl into the backseat of the car, is that the fault of the car manufacturer?

I also think Germany may have a bias given their own car industry.

What comma.ai is doing I think is categorically different.

I'm okay with people hacking on their own stuff, I just don't like the "This is Alpha don't use it" when they obviously intend you to buy and use it that way.

[buran77]

> I also think Germany may have a bias given their own car industry.

This isn't really a fair argument to be honest. You're brushing the court's justification aside ("By using the term 'autopilot' and other wording, the defendant suggests that their vehicles are technically able to drive completely autonomously.") to focus on a weak link between the country having a strong auto industry, and the justice system banning advertisement for something Tesla does not actually deliver.

> I just don't think autopilot means autonomous driving and I think that's clear to people.

Tesla was claiming their cars have "all the necessary hardware for FSD" since at least 2016 [0]. That's an obviously misleading statement since not even expert engineers know if that hardware is enough. If anything the general consensus is that it isn't, and Musk's missed promises support this.

> If someone thinks...

When it comes to misleading advertisement the technical definition isn't very relevant. As the name suggests, it's about whether enough people are mislead into believing they're buying something else. This was raised by consumer groups after realizing the payed promise of FSD never came. Customers shouldn't be expected to be experts in all things. So if the marketing makes it sound to regular people like the product is something other than what it actually is then it's fair to call it "misleading".

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=all+the+necessary+hardware+...

[bko]

> This comes across as them selling a product they know could fail in dangerous ways, but they don't want to be responsible for any of it.

This is just a safety precaution. Why wouldn't they put this in there? It may not hold up in court but it can't hurt. I don't think this means they "know it could fail in dangerous ways".

The safety model in comma.ai is actually quite brilliant. It can't perform any action faster than you're able to correct and disengage. To test it, they have someone drive while a malicious passenger seat has full access of the controls as limited to by the software. The passenger then messes with the steering and acceleration without the main driver's knowledge. The driver has to prevent the actions. The torque limit is much lower than that of Tesla or other lane-keep assist tools.

[picks_at_nits]

"It may not hold up in court but it can't hurt"

If you sell someone something with a nudge-nudge, wink-wink, and they get killed using it, it absolutely hurts. You may be able to weasel out of being held accountable for it, in which case it won't hurt you, but the larger issue here is that this kind of misleading copy can lead to people making poor decisions.

You may have put it in the fine print that it's not a real product, but the whole point of nudge-nudge wink-wink is to strongly imply that it's a real product worth real money, and thus you are going out of your way to encourage people to try it and take chances with real lives.

[bko]

What's the appropriate level of liability?

If I buy a cell phone holder for my car, and it distracts me and I get into an accident? What if Car Play lags and i'm distracted and I get into an accident? What if radio plays an ambulance and I freak out and get into an accident? What if my sunglasses make me mistake a red light?

This product does lane assist. It does a good job according to consumer reports [0], higher than all other lane assists. It doesn't detect stop signs or traffic lights or drive for you. It keeps your lane. It acts predictably and gives the driver enough time to react.

Unfortunately the liability model is messed up. I think this product is relatively tame and should allow to exist. And you need to pay attention. They even have inward facing cameras to make sure you're paying attention, more than most other companies. They do everything they can to be safe but of course they're not stupid and they'll put in a sweeping statement on liability.

This is really pushing forward the self-driving industry and is an incredible feat of engineering. It's much more open and transparent than every other lane keeping software, and it's being developed with a lot of thought and care from a talented engineer as opposed to some nameless faceless bureaucratic commission in Ford or some other dinosaur.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/37833/consumer-reports-ranks-t...

[picks_at_nits]

I'm not gonna debate the "appropriate level of liability."

My point has to do with what you're signalling. If a thing is alpha-level, and real humans can get killed, I wouldn't let random people buy it and use it in their cars, period.

Informed consent is deeply problematic for a product like this: Very few people have the expertise to look at the code and the hardware and properly evaluate the risks, right down to understanding which kinds of edge cases need to be very carefully avoided.

Unless you're vetting researchers and barring people who just want to save a few bucks and brag their car self-drives, you really don't know if every person who downloads the extra software really does grasp the implications of what they're consenting to.

You might grasp the implications, and so might many people in this thread, but that doesn't guarantee that everyone does. THE AUDIENCE OF HACKER NEWS IS NOT A REPRESENTATIVE SAMPLE OF SOCIETY.

And we are talking about a product to be used on open roads: In addition to informed consent from the person who downloads the software, if they get into an accident with another vehicle, pedestrian, or cyclist, did any of those people consent to share the road with someone who installed alpha software on their device?

Morally, I can't get behind a few disclaimers and a nudge-nudge, wink-wink for any kind of autonomous driving tech, even if it's "just" lane-keeping.

———

Update: But to be clear, I am in favour of people tinkering with all sorts of digital automotive tech, and we really should find a way for lone inventors or small teams to innovate without the "enterprise outfits" using regulatory capture to drown small competitors with red tape.

I'm only arguing in favour of truly informed consent, which I believe is tricky for driver assistance technology being provided to arbitrary customers.

[bko]

So your main problem is about the disclaimer and that its called alpha. I provided a source that rates it the best product among all other competitors and the highest score on keep driver engage. And they have the most miles of any other lane assist technology. So I think its safe. I think the alpha is more tongue in cheek and is not a term that means anything really apart from, as you say, a wink and a nod.

For the laymen user, they won't read the disclaimer or understand what Alpha means or even know that is is "alpha". I'm an engineer and I probably won't ever really audit the code. I will do my research like most other people, read online reviews or testimonials like Consumer Reports.

So are you against all lane assist technology? How about auto-braking? Anti lock breaks?

[jeffreygoesto]

Please don't doxx Ford engineers if you don't give any proof. There are hard working, ethical people working who don't want to kill people by lightheartedly pushing stuff on the road. Just because you don't know them does not mean they are not talented.

[greenrd]

I think you meant "diss", not "doxx".

[tjoff]

> This comes across as them selling a product they know could fail in dangerous ways, but they don't want to be responsible for any of it.

Exactly the same as Tesla then?

Though I do think they are both terrible reckless.

"The driver is always responsible" might or might not be a good enough legal scapegoat, but morally inexcusable.

[gonehome]

Not at all the same as Tesla.

Tesla expects you to use its product on the road and expects it to work within the constraints they tell you with you also paying attention.

[tjoff]

> "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.

[jryle70]

> Because you are always responsible and are always expected to recover from anything the autopilot might ever come up with.

That's always been the case for any driving assistance systems that automakers offer, AFAIK. Do you object to the state of driving assistance in general or just how Tesla implements it?

[tjoff]

Well driving assistance are mostly about assistance.

While Tesla allows for and gives the impression of it doing more than that, when it can't. You are expected to react within a split second at any time. Actually just driving the car is a way simpler task than supervising someone else that has unintuitive blind spots.

Something that google discovered early on and anyone that thinks about it realize. A car that mostly drives itself is way more dangerous than a car without any assistance at all.

Ask Uber.

[luplex]

Tesla guarantees that an attentive driver can safely take control.

Comma does not.

[DesolationJones]

They do guarantee that.

https://medium.com/@comma_ai/how-to-write-a-car-port-for-ope...

"No ADAS system currently on the market has safety guarantees on perception or planning algorithms.

So, what must be guaranteed is the ability of the driver to easily regain full control of the vehicle at any time. In openpilot, this is done through the satisfaction of the 2 main safety principles that a Level 2 driver assistance system must have:

1. The driver must always be capable to immediately re-take manual control of the vehicle, by stepping on either pedal or by pressing the cancel button;

2.The vehicle must not alter its trajectory too quickly for the driver to safely react. This means that while the system is engaged, the actuators are constrained to operate within reasonable limits."

[camjohnson26]

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.

[almost_usual]

Welcome to the world of aftermarket vehicle modifications.

[Piskvorrr]

...and woe betide you if you try to get your insurance company to pay up, ever again. "Aftermarket? Cool, a get-out-of-reimbursement-free card, have a nice day!"

[almost_usual]

I’ve had aftermarket mods for years and haven’t had problems. There’s a big market and people will do what they want.

[Piskvorrr]

Sure, I'm all for that. OTOH, my experiences with insurance companies is that they'll spend 10x the money and effort for denying payment, and the contracts are heavily weighted in their favor.

[onelovetwo]

I think its just them trying to fend off those people that are looking for anything to sue companies. Telsa gets these lawsuits all the time, but they have a bunch of lawyers to deal with it.

[tedivm]

That line only exists in their Git Repository, which contains the latest code. That line does not exist on their website.

If you want to use software directly out of someone's development git repository then yeah, you're going to get alpha level code.