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Comment by hias | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but how can this be legal? With his homemade solution, he is not only endangering himself but all the other people in the cars around him.

Usually before you are allowed to use something like this on a public road your stuff has to be tested and approved by the state. At least this is how it is in Europe, does this not matter in the states?

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He's sitting behind the wheel ready to take over, it's not quite the same as making a cup of tea while the car drives itself.

Yes, but what if his system suddenly decides to turn hard right for no reason while driving fast and he runs into another car, human, tree, whatever and he has no chance to react quickly enough? This is different to a PS3 crashing because he made some error.

Yes, what if, of the thousands of people that will die today [1](and tomorrow and the next day and the next...) in traffic accidents, one single sprained ankle or whiplashed neck was caused by, gasp, a computer.

Your faux ethical hacking outrage is thinly veiled and entirely misdirected.

[1]http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safet...

Huh? If he had skipped the computer and just taken a bunch of phencyclidine before getting behind the wheel, couldn't have deployed the same derisive dismissal about arguments that people shouldn't drive impaired by phencyclidine? Not many people are going to die today because of PCP either!

The steering is massively torque limited by the car's EPS module(5x lower limit than Tesla). It can't turn hard right, it can lazily list to the right, giving you tons of time to react.

I actually have put a lot of thought into safety :)

How do you train it for emergency situations (i.e. a car suddenly turning left in front of you)? I'd imagine it would be hard to get many of those in the training data set.

Easy, you drive in a simulator! (ie: backfeed/simulate LIDAR and camera data using a video game (GTA5 for example)). Then try to simulate lots of near-crashes, reactions to traffic lights, signs, etc. Hotz's code just reacts to inputs. Simulate the inputs and you can run any training case you want.

Exactly the plan for outlier cases. Though perhaps not GTA...

email me (profile) if you need a simulated driver ;)

Maybe partner with the creator of the XXX simulator series, you could make some kind of "MMO" where each participants have to run errands the safest way possible while interacting with each other, and upload the training data. Some player could be randomly elected as "maverick" whose goal is to crash and cause accident, the other player would have to handle them.

And if driving in highway is a problem, why not use a test terrain complete with fog generator? With RC car representing pedestrian, other car, animal, ... feed the video first into an AR system and then give it to the neural net.

anyway good hack, I wish you well :)

Have you got some screenshots/videos to share of the car screen doing its thing? The Bloomberg video did a pretty good job, but, we're geeks and we need more of that stuff.

You are, of course, assuming that his system was built properly to maintain manual override. If the vehicle is drive-by-wire, I have no idea if his way of hacking the vehicle would have possibly impeded those systems.

I bet the override is the joystick.

There are laws[1] allowing public road testing of such cars in a few US states and EU countries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Legislation

I doubt this is meant for single individuals instead of a company. I also doubt it is allowed without prior notice.

If he wanted to be a company instead of an individual for legal purposes, he could probably incorporate in his own name fairly easily.

He has a company: http://comma.ai.

and http://reactions.co

I mean http://comma.ai is the self-driving car company. (Reactions was a hackathon project, not a real co.)

If Elon is seriously interested in what he can do, why doesn't he let him use the Tesla test track? That's a safe space for him to try out his solution and affords a control scenario to compare against MobileEye/Tesla.

And I think you missed the part where he wants to drive for Uber, so he's also endangering the passengers in his car. (!)

Pretty sure that driving for Uber is a way to rake up more miles (training data) rather than actually test the system.

Maybe this is another reason he isn't joining a corporate entity for his project. The insurance and legal liability will prevent him from testing and gathering "in-the-wild" data. Very risky and dangerous process that, i think in his mind will give him a faster improvement curve, compared to indoors and confined testing.

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