Hacker News Reader

Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Comma thinks they are ready because it's essentially an Adaptive Cruise Control, and as they state on their website, they scored #1 for best at that by Consumer Reports compared to the stock offerings from Ford, Nissan, and other carmakers. Frankly, I don't know if _anyone_ should be including this kind of tech if it's this early, but Comma is currently far from the only one for what it does. Frankly, because it scored #1 and the code is open-source, I'd be much more likely to trust Comma than the stock offering from my manufacturer.

View on HN

> best at that by Consumer Reports compared to the stock offerings from Ford, Nissan, and other carmakers.

Read through the Consumer Reports PDF [1]. It's abundantly clear that they have no idea how to properly evaluate adaptive cruise systems.

What this report tells you is exactly what you would expect from a Consumer Reports publication: the generic impression that a typical consumer will have after a few hours of use. This sort of superficial analysis is completely unrelated to anything approaching a real safety analysis.

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

Yep. It's not "this is less likely to kill you", it's "this has a better UI and some sort of ML process that's supposed to check you're looking at the road". Somehow they score it highly for telling you when you should and shouldn't use it for a product whose disclaimer says you shouldn't really be using it at all.

It's a bit like declaring your bike outperforms cars in crash safety because a magazine gives it 8/10 for handling and 9/10 for the visibility of your yellow jacket and your rear light having a "flash" mode.

Man, you have a lot of hate for CR. I think their report makes it very clear that these aren't recommendations of systems in any way but rather an attempt to start formalizing testing and the state of various systems that are out there. In multiple places they say this is a report FOR THE INDUSTRY, not consumers.

They even have a specific callout for Comma:

> A determination was made to include the Comma Two Open Pilot system manufactured by > Comma.ai. Although Consumer Reports does not endorse after-market modifications to all > consumers, we feel that it is important to include the test results in this report to the industry. The > direct comparison of this system to the other OEM systems will hopefully provide insight on this > alternative approach and highlight the areas across the industry that have room for improvement.

It is at least SOMETHING. I haven't seen anything else even close to as formalized that looks across all the various systems out there. Do you have better ones to look at?

> these aren't recommendations of systems in any way

This is a deflection. I'm responding to a comment that stated:

>> as they state on their website, they scored #1 for best at that by Consumer Reports compared to the stock offerings

CR is irresponsible for issuing ranked scores while saying in the fine print that these scores aren't actually recommendations.

That they didn't foresee comma.ai using their recommendation in marketing only makes them that much more irresponsible.

>It enables your car to steer, accelerate, and brake automatically within its lane. Drive to a highway, press the cruise control SET button, and openpilot will engage

Ah, it isn't marketed as a full autopilot. I'm not 100% confident that it should be used in the current state but I'm also not an auto regulator, so we shall see.

I have one. Works pretty well but requires a fair bit of tweaking. It's called a dev kit for a reason.

Many car models limit the amount (and at what rate) that the computer system can turn the wheel. The system is piggybacking off of this engineering for most of its 'safety'. There was people spoofing park assist on some models to get very strong control of the wheel but such discussion got banned on the official discord.

Which leads me to my big problem with Comma.ai: it's open source but not very open. Look at the code, go back several releases and watch the number of comments regress.

There's zero documentation, the wiki is a fucking joke and for some reason does not come up in a google search and is just missing critical information. No, I don't want to watch a 5 fucking minute video to find a 10 second clip with the information I need. Write that shit down.

Instead you ask a question and some asshole that is gunning for a job at comma posts a passive agressive screenshot of them using the discord search. It's almost like if you put effort into having information recorded instead of being a dick you wouldn't have to be a dick. That wouldn't be very fun or inflate egos much so it doesn't happen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com