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