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Comment by ra7 | Hacker News Reader

SAE Level 4 driving is several orders of magnitude harder than SAE Level 2. You are either good enough to drive without requiring a driver or you are not. There is a reason developing L4 systems cost billions of dollars.

George Hotz thinks Comma does the job with only a fraction of the spending compared to the likes of Waymo, Cruise, Zoox, but fails to realize his product also does only a fraction of what the others are trying to do.

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"Several orders of magnitude" by what dimension? Engineering labor? Hardware expenses and testing? You can't just throw out a dimension of scale and say, oh it's so-and-so hard that's why it costs billions.

If you were trying to build L4, you'd hire a small team of exceptional engineers, and spend a few thousand on hardware tests. Billions doesn't come close.

You'd try and get Level 2 to be as satisfactory as possible, and see what percentage of the time you could achieve Level 3.

> If you were trying to build L4, you'd hire a small team of exceptional engineers, and spend a few thousand on hardware tests. Billions doesn't come close.

Not sure if you are aware that the self driving (robotaxi) companies have spent tens of billions of dollars in the last decade. R&D expenses are huge, building custom sensors and vehicles is hard and fleet maintenance/operations is costly.

>and spend a few thousand on hardware tests

Okay, that should let you just about afford to certify an Ethernet cable.

Hotz’s product should be compared to what Waymo can do right now, not what it’s trying to do.

The point is Hotz's product shouldn't be compared to Waymo at all. One is driverless and the other is not. It should be compared to the likes of Tesla Autopilot or driver assist systems offered by other OEMs.

Different strategies to bring the same core tech to market. Absolutely comparable.

The difference in capabilities makes the core tech very different.

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