[yewenjie]

AFAIK Comma.ai is the only open-source company in the self-driving cars space. It is very interesting that they are continuously launching consumer-products with a small team and in a highly competitive space where the other players are quite big.

[alpaca128]

They have a more focused approach that simplifies it a lot. Where others build whole self-driving cars Comma uses existing interfaces and sensors in the vehicle. That's far less complexity to worry about.

[stefan_]

This does not in any shape or form compete in the self-driving cars space; the thing doesn't have a rear camera!

This is basically the "rsync as Dropbox" approach to augmenting your car with a hacky version of automatic cruise control, with a bonus lawsuit should you ever be in a crash significant enough to warrant the attention (think paralysis).

[birken]

Comma is far and away the best version of "automatic cruise control" that exists in any consumer car. If you think Comma is hacky then wait until you see Tesla's version, which costs $10k and only works on one brand of car!

The stock "automatic cruise control" is most cars is far worse and far more dangerous than Comma, and those companies aren't getting taken down by lawsuits. At the end of the day, the driver is responsible for the operation of the vehicle. Comma is a tool the driver can use, and one that undoubtedly makes driving safer for themselves and other vehicles on the road.

[kelnos]

> If you think Comma is hacky then wait until you see Tesla's version, which costs $10k and only works on one brand of car!

What does the cost and number of supported vehicles have to do with whether or not the software is hacky? (Hint: nothing; it has nothing to do with it.)

> The stock "automatic cruise control" is most cars is far worse and far more dangerous than Comma

That's a pretty extraordinary claim to make without presenting any evidence.

> one that undoubtedly makes driving safer for themselves and other vehicles on the road.

Ditto.

The front page of the Comma website claims "millions" of miles have been driven using it; given that in the US there's about 1 fatality per 100 million miles driven, I don't think we have anywhere near enough data to make any claims about Comma's safety. It may actually be safer, but I don't think we have a way to know that yet.

And also, given that Comma supports several different vehicles, I suspect that we'll have to consider its safety record on a per-make (and in some cases possibly per-model) basis, not on the system as a whole, in order to compare apples to apples.

[rwiggum]

"automatic cruise control" is free and comes with every Tesla. It is not $10k. It is what they call "autopilot" and is free. "Full self driving" is what is $10k and includes automatic navigation on highways when using "automatic cruise control"

[PhasmaFelis]

> only works on one brand of car!

Is that a downside? Anyone who's ever struggled with hardware driver problems knows that the more hardware configurations your software (notionally) supports, the more likely you are to have show-stopping bugs.

In a home PC, some reliability is arguably a fair trade-off for versatility. Not in a car.

[varelse]

Um... Have you driven a Mach E yet? No interest in its upcoming FSD, but the adaptive cruise control and lane assistance is wonderfully conservative and useful.

[birken]

I've only driven my car, but Consumer Reports tested a bunch of cars and rated Comma the best [1]. Maybe another car since then is better, but of course Comma is always getting updated and you just download the new version to your device when it comes out.

1: https://data.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/...

[varelse]

After reading a description of the comma device and how it's being used it seems uncannily like how my Mach E drives. But also as both my first EV and my first semi self-driving car, perhaps I have a different set of standards. My TLDR was that the adaptive cruise control and automatic lane keeping extended my daily driving range by several hundred miles by reducing cognitive load significantly. It was the best 900 miles I've ever driven.

But watching people nitpick various variants of electric crossover SUVs, I realize I would probably like just about all of them because none of my cars have been anything like that up to now.

So I keyed in my other two cars to see if I could put the comma into it and alas I cannot. They are 2013 and 2016 models respectively.

And yes the system in the Mach E is brand new:

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a32896537/fords-driver-ass...

[mgraczyk]

If you haven't tried it, I would refrain from making that claim.

I used the v1 of this device for ~1 year, and since then driving has never felt the same. It was sooo much less annoying to do regular commutes when the device took control for even 90% of the trip. This was true even though I still paid attention to the road and had hands ready to take the wheel.

[kelnos]

Sure, but your experience doesn't really tell us about the overall safety of the system. How many total miles have been driven by people using a Comma system? The front page of their website says "millions", which is several orders of magnitude less than Tesla Autopilot (several billion miles at this point).

Given that in the US there is around 1 fatality per 100 million miles driven, I don't think "millions" of miles driven with Comma is anywhere near enough to say anything about its safety record.

[bobsomers]

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. This is an accurate, if colorful, assessment. It has all the same safety problems as a Tesla with even worse sensors, less compute, and practically zero real safety V&V work.

They cutely dodged NHTSA's regulatory ire by shipping a "dash cam" that happens to run software you can install which makes it semi-autonomous... even though said software is made by the same company that ships the "dash cam". NHTSA isn't stupid, so I'm curious what it will take for this loophole to eventually be properly closed.

Sadly, safety is a lot like security. When it's done well, it's invisible, but when it's done poorly...

[kyle_martin1]

Not actually open source. The source code that’s available is a thin wrapper around a closed-source ML model. If George really cared about Open Source he would release the training architecture and training data.

[mgraczyk]

As somebody who works with video and photo user data for machine learning, I'd say they are much better off not releasing the majority of their data. Unfortunately there are fairly severe legal consequences for commercial use of certain kinds of unconsented user data in various US states (consent of the people filmed, not the people collecting the data), and even companies in complete compliance have to deal with a huge potential legal headache to prove that their datasets follow every local regulation.

[kyle_martin1]

I agree with you but...you're also not claiming you're project/product is open source.