This Small Box Can Turn Your Car Into An Autonomous Self Driving Car
This
green plastic box can turn your car into a Tesla, it can easily be plugged in
to a standard car to give it self-driving abilities.
Comma One, what seems
to be an “off-the-shelf” self-driving module, can turn your car into an
autonomous Tesla capable of driving itself with no human involvement. Such
modules may become a thing in the near future because they come cheap and can
give an autopilot button to standard vehicles.
Founded by George Hotz, a pro-iPhone and PlayStation hacker, Comma.ai is looking to become the next big thing in the self-driving hype and according to the company, their product will be available for general purchase by the end of this year.
Comma One won’t exactly turn your car into a cognitive death
machine, rather, it will give it basic autopilot abilities much similar to the
Tesla Autopilot – meaning, it can perform basic functions such as accelerating,
braking, or maybe changing lanes.
Almost As Good
As Tesla
The device, made up of shiny green covers, will mainly
consist of camera sensors but will also use a car’s radar systems for
additional road data. Which means it will only work with high-end cars with
intelligent radar-powered cruise control. So you won’t see it working on a
Honda City but it might work on some Toyota Corolla and Honda Civic models
along with most newer imported vehicles.
Hotz told TechCrunch that his self-driving solution is on par with Tesla’s Autopilot,
which actually works quite well.
We think it is extremely unlikely that a
single person or even a small company that lacks extensive engineering
validation capability will be able to produce an autonomous driving system that
can be deployed to production vehicles,
Even so, Comma One comes much cheaper and you won’t necessarily
have to buy a full-sized Tesla or any other self-driving car to own this
feature. When it hits the shelves at the end of this year, it will cost $999
but come with a $24 monthly subscription fee. The monthly fee is for software
updates and development, which will keep making the module better and help it
adapt to a wide range of scenarios.
The Uber
Incident
Major companies have been testing self-driving vehicles for
several years now, but it will still take some time before these systems will
actually become reliable enough to be accepted by the general public or the
authorities. Recently, Uber’s self-driving vehicle struck a passenger in
Arizona, resulting in her death, after which the company had to pull out all of
its test units. However, reports confirmed that even if the car was being
manually driven, it wasn’t possible to avoid the collision.
The idea of self-driving is still contentious, a Tesla car also
crashed and caused a death while in autopilot. On this matter, Hortz said,
40,000 people die a year from not paying
attention. It isn’t like it is a special case ‘a self-driving car killed him’,
it was the case of a driver not paying attention. It did unfortunately happen
with Tesla. And I think Tesla’s response was very appropriate.
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