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Comment by bilsbie | Hacker News Reader

I can’t wrap my head around the fact that 275 car models include all the actuators needed for self driving driving and there’s some kind of port third party software can hook into.

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Level 2 driving assistance is commonplace on many new vehicles, often as a standard feature. They are just significantly more conservative in their functionality compared to the level 2 offerings from Tesla, and marketed as safety features rather than "self driving" features.

It's important to note that nothing we're talking about here is actually "self driving" per SAE standards. Openpilot, Tesla's Autopilot/FSD, Honda Sensing, Toyota Safety Sense, Hyundai SmartSense, etc are all level 2 driving assistance features.

This turns level 2 driver assistance features into ... nicer level 2 driver assistance features.

Really need some decimal points in the SAE list. Fully self driving but a human has to watch, and lane keeping are both level 2

"Fully self driving but a human has to watch" is nonsensical. Responsibility for observing the road and making decisions is a very important and inseparable part of driving. Mechanistically manipulating the steering, brakes, and accelerator is not the hard part.

https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update

Vehicles with levels 0-2 of driver support are never self-driving at any moment of operation. These systems might be able to manipulate the controls of the vehicle, but they are not good enough to make decisions without constant supervision at all times.

Level 3 is partial self-driving, where the vehicle can assume responsibility for driving under some narrow circumstances.

Full self driving doesn't happen until level 4.

I think the reason that there's no decimal points is because J3016 is really a road-map of the milestones on the way to full automation, not a buyers guide.

In which case the number should be multiplied by the percentage of cases it can be activated in, if you can Level 3 self drive in, eg "up to 37 mph but only on highways" so you multiply 3 by 0.001 because it's only useful in 0.1% of conditions, and then you can add that to the times level 2 works.

That's not possible to calculate because the total denominator of possible "cases" approaches infinity. Level 3 doesn't define what the cases for operation are, that is up to each individual implementor of such a system to define. The criteria is likely to be more much more complicated, like "the output of all 12 sensors when applied to this algorithm, and referenced against this mapping data, delivers a confidence greater than x"

Things don't really get that simple until level 5.

Even at level 4, we're going to have vehicles that pull over when they can't figure out how to navigate successfully.

It's a useless number for consumers then, a Level 3 system could be way less safe/useful than a Level 2 system, because it only works on a sunny day in slow traffic with other cars for reference on a highway

I’ve been saying this since Tesla released autopilot because I personally think teslas implementation is the best but there isn’t an easy way to compare it to something like radar cruise with lane keeping other than saying they’re both level 2.

Exactly, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai / Kia, etc have systems, they're just nowhere near Open pilot.

I don't know if there's a physical port in most cars, but it uses the CAN bus which has been around since the 1980s.

Also, most cars that have distance assist and lane keeping probably have the required hardware to control speed and steering to some extent.

Nevertheless, it's still impressive that so many cars are supported... and that it can be retrofitted like this at all!

They also lie about models that are supported and won't assist you when you run into that. Had to return one myself. Found no evidence anywhere that my model/year was ever actually supported and anyone was using it either.

Sounds like they refunded you?

Yeah, that process at least was painless

Could you say what car ?

2023 Forte

https://www.reddit.com/r/Comma_ai/comments/197k04q/2023_kia_...

https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/issues/30936

You can find a few attempts of people trying to get it to work in their discord with no clear positive outcome, discord is unfortunately not search indexed.

It looks like support was added in February

https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/pull/30761

Yeah it was on the supported list when I bought it in October of 2023. The website asks your make/model/year when you buy if I recall correctly, that's how it tells you which harness to get.

I found out I needed to update some files in the firmware, followed the guide for that. Asked for help in the Discord. I could never get it working though and returned it after a week. I was going to hang on to it and harass people on Discord, but didn't want to lose track of time and go beyond the return window. Believe me, I really wanted it to work.

Looks like it was added to the supported list before the explicit support I guess

https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/commit/e3275e918354945d...

> discord is unfortunately not search indexed.

Using discord, etc for any open source project discussions is really unproductive.

Get it that people like the immediacy of chat style communication. But it seems to encourage way more noise and less thoughtful dialogue. The worst aspect is that it locks away a lot of useful information. Trying to dig through chat histories for information is a horrible experience.

> But it seems to encourage way more noise and less thoughtful dialogue.

But compare it to something like Microsoft support forums and you immediately realize why people are using it. It might not be the best implementation of chat, but the immediacy and lack of formality are undeniably valuable.

Comparing MS support forums to turd makes the turd seem better. It's a poor example. Discord sucks.

There's a very active community on Discord that would have been happy to help you add support for your car assuming it has the right hardware.

https://comma.ai/vehicles has also been improved quite a bit in the past year.

I beleive in the US OBDII ports are required in all vehicles 1996 and later.

I suspect Openpilot sends packages to CAN bus to do steering but what makes the physical wheel rotates? I'm confused. Or when a human makes a correction to auto steering, perhaps there could be some kind of full duplex synchronization mechanism

I suspect it may be even more than that theoretically. A lot of VAG cars based on the same platform are missing.

Somebody should make an adapter so I can plug a PS2 Controller into it.

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