Comma didn't fizzle out.
Cruse and Waymo have invested billions, they need 10’s of billions in annual sales or their project is a failure.
The reason the company might fail is because their main thesis, being that car manufacturers would just license the self driving tech to somebody else (like Comma), never came about. Car manufacturers are just too conservative. It was a perfectly reasonable bet to make though. Unfortunately they ended up in the business of selling hardware and giving away software for free when they wanted to be in the business of selling software.
https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2023/company/porsche-mobiley...
I'm Comma user in one of my cars as well, and I do like it. But, when was last time you tried built-in driving assist in a Tesla-priced car?
Tesla's driver assist is nothing special nowadays.
Things that Comma handles seamlessly that the built-in cruise in both cars will not:
- Full stop and go
- Sharp turns on the highway that require slowing down (both built-in adaptive cruise modes will gladly just drive you off a cliff at 65 mph)
- Situations where the lane lines are hard to see or are implied
- Non-highway driving
- Not requiring me to touch the steering wheel every 20 seconds
Maybe those things work in higher end cars (though I'd say the Ioniq is a fairly high-end car), but then again with Comma you get it for ~$2k in a ton of cars instead of having to buy a luxury car.
It is true that if you are on a highway, with clear lane lines, the steering assist in both cars is certainly a lot better than nothing, but it's just not nearly matching the reliability and versatility of Comma in any sort of imperfect situation.
In many countries doing this will void your insurance.
> - Sharp turns on the highway that require slowing down (both built-in adaptive cruise modes will gladly just drive you off a cliff at 65 mph)
While it's probably given that this will happen, it's also an infrastructural failure. Just place a limited speed limit sign way before the sharp turn, or fix the road so it doesn't make a sharp turn.
George is courageous, inspiring, and highly intelligent. He stands for what he believes in. He stands up for himself and his beliefs, and talks back to powerful people.
How many tries did it take to invent scalable electricity, or the light bulb?
George Hotz is frikkin awesome
Whereas comma is taking the right approach of a nimble team, iterate fast and ship a working product (even if not L4-5), get cash flow, next milestone.
It takes guts to put out such bold bets in writing. We've seen many (senior!) tech people sneer at George's at times naive optimism. I actually find the "how hard could be" attitude refreshing against "no no it is complicated you can't do that" gatekeeping. Because otherwise we will end up using big-tech for lack of alternative. It is not the critic who counts and all that..
Is that it? SF only? After billions invested? There is a laundry list of those that tried and failed especially with burning an insurmountable amount of VC money even with billions of their own money.
Lyft: Scrapped and sold their self-driving project. [0]
Uber: Scrapped their robot-taxi project and sold it off. [1]
Zoox: Once valued at $3BN, acquired by Amazon for $1BN after nearly going bankrupt and is still using specialised cars for self driving only in SF. [2]
Cruise: Acquired by GM and still using specialised cars for self driving in SF [3]
Drive.ai: Ran out of money and almost bankrupt and acquired by Apple. [4] No where to be found on the roads.
Waymo: Same situation as Cruise, but Google keeping them alive.
Comma has lasted longer than these over-valued companies and is already in lots of consumer grade vehicles beyond SF today and not in specialised cars and taxis unlike Cruise and Waymo who are still stuck in SF [5].
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/04/26/business/stock-marke...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/12/08/944337751/uber-sells-its-auto...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/26/amazon-buys-self-driving-tec...
[3] https://fortune.com/2016/03/11/gm-buying-self-driving-tech-s...
[4] https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/25/self-driving-startup-drive...
[5] https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/18/cruise-waymo-near-approval...
Different roads, geography, etc?
which is the critical element everyone is in denial about, even to the point of saying Tesla has a long way to catch up.
1. They are living in a sf USA big city centric bubble. 2. They are very easily influenced by marketing. 3. They are just trolling.
Comma is a product you can buy all code is opensource. All others is just a service, where people could theoretically just be diving remote and they sell it as self driving.