Comma is my favorite “AI” company. Really incredible piece of tech in a tiny package, and it truly improves your life to have it.
I wish it worked with my Mitsubishi Outlander, but just having it on my Corolla is enough. Their supported brand list will definitely factor into my next car buying decision.
I like Comma. I like geohot (I wouldn't want to work for him I imagine it is intense) but I like the contrary attitude and also the product as seen as demoed on youtube.
> Currently, openpilot performs the functions of Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and Automated Lane Centering (ALC). openpilot can accelerate, brake automatically for other vehicles, and steer to follow the road/lane. [1]
[Some of the] Cars that are currently supported already have "smart cruise" and "lane follow". Why then use a third-party self-driving system?
> My <device> already comes with built in <software> why would I install anything else?
Top voted comment on hacker news btw.
Ok that was probably unnecessarily snarky I hope you don't take offense, but it seems the hacker spirit has been fading more often from this site, we used to replace stuff with inferior versions just to see if we could.
It's infinitely better than HDA2 at tracking and maintaining lanes.
HDA2 cuts out if there is a break in lines more than 50ft or so.
Openpilot can track the slightest of roads, even able to follow off-road the tracks in grass from a leading car.
It does basically everything HDA2 does and then some, and does it much better.
It has a driver-monitoring camera that you control, that monitors for inattentiveness which is much more effective than simple wheel-torque based sensors.
Big one, because all those cars require you to touch and move the steering wheel every X seconds. All the ones that let you go hands free cost a subscription of around $500 a year (Ford BlueCruise, GM SuperCruise). And even those only let you use hands free mode on pre-mapped roads, typically only interstates.
Becasue most cars with lane follow still lose lock on the lane when the lines are hard to see (rains, snow, etc) or missing due to exists and other things.
Becasue most cars with lane follow fail to keep well when the turn gets too sharp.
Comma.ai lets you go completely hands free with no wheel nags. It also works just fine when there are no lane lines or poorly visible lines. It also supports lane change by signaling, and then nudging the wheel when it's clear to move.
There is also an experimental mode which stops and goes at stop signs and stop lights.
If the driver monitoring camera in the comma detects you fell asleep or something, it will slow the car down and pull over. All the stock lane keep that I have used in cars, if you fail to nudge the wheel they just disengage and you keep going at full speed in a straight line...
Then we delve into OpenPilot forks like SunnyPilot that let you do things like decouple gas/break control from steering control, so you can control the gas/brake yourself and let comma just always steer for you. Comma can also steer more aggressively in turns than any lane keep I have seen, and when it can't you will see the limit being reached on the little display so you know you will need to help out on that tight curve.
Experimental mode isn't the best all the time, and SunnyPilot allows hybrid mode which uses regular mode and dynamically switches to experimental mode for stop signs and stop lights.
With SunnyPilot it can even read your car's blind spot monitors to automatically make the lane change hen clear without you having to nudge the wheel.
Some have been playing with concepts of auto navigation too where the car will take exits and turn through intersections for you.
The comma.ai devices have 10W of compute power and the current driving models only use 1W, so there is room to scale to better models with teh current comma devices. There is also talk of supporting more cameras for side views and external GPUs addons with 100W compute for potential FSD level models.
I wondered the same thing but after trying a few oem attempts, there’s definitely huge room for improvement. Lane following isn’t very ‘smart’ and doesn’t take context into account (ie. changing position in the lane based on clearance from other vehicles, potholes, upcoming curves etc.)
Commercial implementations back when this launched was vastly inferior to it, if users' accounts are to be believed. Obvious signs of too high P in PID and such.
Tesla Autopilot was always available, but they were as sketchy as it always had been. Shoving the head into road barriers and fire trucks with rear ends that were less car looking especially to pre-LLM image recognition models.
OpenPilot also allow retrofits. People who own 2017-2023ish cars, shipped between the times after self driving hype took off and before command signature enforcement was widely implemented, can DIY self driving without re-buying the whole car, put aside whether it's legal or whether you should.
I have a car with smart cruise, but there's plenty of room for improvement. It isn't very smart at determining when it can avoid braking, such as when a car well ahead has slowed for a right turn. It also brakes too aggressively when someone cuts in front of me on the highway, in situations where just lifting off the gas would be better.
It also times out very quickly when traffic comes to a complete standstill, requiring manual intervention to get going again, and it doesn't give any indication to the driver when that occurs.
If these things bothered me much more than they do, I'd be interested in comma.ai as a possible solution. As it stands, the OEM radar cruise control is "Eh, good enough, I guess."
Lane follow? Does it have lane discovery? There was snow on my commute this morning. 4-land highway was basically follow the leader. Pick some line where you think there is the most traction and stick with it. I have yet to see footage of an autodrive system in such a situation.
- InsureCo, how may I help you?
- Hey, I want to ask about installing a self driving module in my car...
- Sure, you mean Tesla upgrade?
- No, another one.
- Another one?
- Yeah, you remember that kid that hacked Playstation?
At the moment in every jurisdiction I’m aware of the driver is always considered as “in charge” of the vehicle no matter what assistance functions are being used. It’s the driver’s responsibility to avoid collisions in all cases.
If you have a collision and your vehicle is judged at fault by whatever authority does it in your area the you are liable.
In an accident, culpability cannot transfer to a computer ostensibly running under your supervision. As a driver, you likely sign away all claims to blaming CommaAI when you accept the EULA & ToS updates.
I mean, just like with a Tesla, the driver is responsible for the actions taken by the car, which means you do need to be paying attention, hands on the wheel, ready to take over at all times.
We don't yet have the legal framework to say 'Sue company x, it wasn't my fault!' You get sued, then you have a very uphill battle to turn around and try to sue the company that provided the 'self driving' functionality because companies put all sorts of 'I totally accept liability for using this' in the T&C of their products.
Seeing things like, "<h2 id="new-driving-model">New driving model</h2>" on their list of latest releases does not inspire a lot of confidence. Yes, the HTML tags are displayed on the page. Some basic quality assurance on the website would help me trust the quality assurance applied to their product offering.
I'm sure the technology is great, but what would be really great for me to use theoretically use it would be for it to be if the company was liable if it caused an at-fault accident. I don't know much about the law around this, but I comfortably get in a Waymo all the time because I have some intuition about it that tells me that their lawyers are scared shitless of killing someone. It's a hard sell for me when it says "self-install at your own risk" but I appreciate the effort.
Wonder if it will be able to work with the Slate pickup when that comes out. Seems like it would be a perfect pairing if the Slate has enough control exposed to it.
8 years later, comma.ai is still standing and operational despite several VC backed competitors raising significantly more than Comma and those competitors (except for Tesla) are now no longer in business.
People here have no idea they are looking at a robotics and AI company which that is Comma.ai
Waymo put a ton of sensors, including lidar and cameras, to create a truly driverless experience. Tesla put a ton of cameras to make a mostly driverless experience (but when you need a driver you NEED a driver). Comma strapped a cellphone cam to the windshield to make a semi driverless experience on straightish roads, and a driver must take over when anything complex happens. Source: very happy comma.ai user for many years now
Waymo basically prioritizes accuracy of surroundings. This is why they started to operate only in certain areas after mappings have been completed. Then within those surroundings they do a mix of things including ML reinforcement learning for behavior as well as optimizations in terms of route planning.
Tesla on the other hand basically went on Musk infinite wisdom and said "humans only need eyes to drive, so we are going to do cameras only". Their methodology is essentially end to end - i.e take a sequence of frames, and train a model to predict where the car is going to go based on human driving data.
Comma Ai basically followed Tesla, except they did so with a much more hacked together approach. Their final product is good, but there is a reason Waymo is winning.
Geohot, holding the title for being #1 simp for Musk, of course subscribed to that philosophy.
When Consumer Reports tested ADAS systems in 2020 [1], they gave their highest rating to the Comma Two. I'm sure it's only gotten better since then.
I really like my 2017 Chevy Bolt except that it doesn't have ACC. I wish I was comfortable installing a Comma on it, but it requires a gas pedal interceptor [2], and I'm not willing to do that to a car that I transport my family in.
I was in the market for this for my Pacifica but I couldn't figure out what this does exactly.
Is it FSD basically?
Is it just lane assist?
Can I put an address in a map and it takes me there?
Very hard to just get these concrete answers, maybe they just take the newbie experience for granted and assume people know these answers. Anyone who owns one of these can answer? Thank you!
Generic Openpilot out of the box is just super nice cruise control right now. So it can do longitudinal and latitudinal control. So it lane keeps, stays behind the car in front of you, etc.
If you use Sunnypilot or one of the other friendly forks, you can do more, but it's not (currently) to the state of Tesla's FSD.
Personally, I recommend buying it if you do a lot of road trips. It's amazing for that. In/around town it's only useful if you have a lot of stop and go traffic, like if you live in LA or other large car-centric city with a big commute.
No it’s not FSD. There is no navigation at all, you’re correct that it’s “just lane assist”. But the lane assist is next level.
I take a few 1,000 mile plus road trips every year and the comma pays for itself every time. Using the stock lane assist, I’m constantly correcting it. The stock assist tries to take an exit, doesn’t handle curves well at all, and any construction or unusual road conditions it won’t work at all.
With the Comma, on the highway it’s basically FSD. On my last 1000 mile trip I never had to disengage, only to pass and make turns.
The biggest advantage is Comma allows you to be completely hands off the wheel. Where lane assist forces you to hold the wheel at all times.
It’s NOT self driving. It’s level 2 driving assist. Really good one, but that has nothing to do with self driving. You are driving the car all the time, it’s only assist that can (and will) try to kill you (and others) with 0 notice if you don’t pay attention.
I got my Comma 4 a week and a half ago and absolutely love the thing. Is it perfect? No. But I can install a fork (Sunnypilot) and tweak the settings and/or code until I get something that I like.
Some cars it does not support because nobody has been interested in testing it out. Some cars will never be supported because they are using an encrypted CANBUS. The list of cars on that list goes up every year. Eventually no current models will be supportable.
It requires steering and cruise control to be able to be controlled by the random pieces of code downloaded from GitHub.
So a 1920s Fords are out, and 2035 BYD flying cars with post-quantum cryptographic command signature enforcement are out too. Toyota bZ sits somewhere in the middle of those. IIRC they got past some types of Toyota security keys but not all.
[+] [-] sebmellen|2 months ago|reply
I wish it worked with my Mitsubishi Outlander, but just having it on my Corolla is enough. Their supported brand list will definitely factor into my next car buying decision.
[+] [-] hahahahhaah|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nashashmi|2 months ago|reply
[Some of the] Cars that are currently supported already have "smart cruise" and "lane follow". Why then use a third-party self-driving system?
[1] https://comma.ai/openpilot#:~:text=Currently%2C%20openpilot%...
[+] [-] nodja|2 months ago|reply
Top voted comment on hacker news btw.
Ok that was probably unnecessarily snarky I hope you don't take offense, but it seems the hacker spirit has been fading more often from this site, we used to replace stuff with inferior versions just to see if we could.
[+] [-] sathackr|2 months ago|reply
HDA2 cuts out if there is a break in lines more than 50ft or so.
Openpilot can track the slightest of roads, even able to follow off-road the tracks in grass from a leading car.
It does basically everything HDA2 does and then some, and does it much better.
It has a driver-monitoring camera that you control, that monitors for inattentiveness which is much more effective than simple wheel-torque based sensors.
[+] [-] SirMaster|2 months ago|reply
Becasue most cars with lane follow still lose lock on the lane when the lines are hard to see (rains, snow, etc) or missing due to exists and other things.
Becasue most cars with lane follow fail to keep well when the turn gets too sharp.
Comma.ai lets you go completely hands free with no wheel nags. It also works just fine when there are no lane lines or poorly visible lines. It also supports lane change by signaling, and then nudging the wheel when it's clear to move.
There is also an experimental mode which stops and goes at stop signs and stop lights.
If the driver monitoring camera in the comma detects you fell asleep or something, it will slow the car down and pull over. All the stock lane keep that I have used in cars, if you fail to nudge the wheel they just disengage and you keep going at full speed in a straight line...
Then we delve into OpenPilot forks like SunnyPilot that let you do things like decouple gas/break control from steering control, so you can control the gas/brake yourself and let comma just always steer for you. Comma can also steer more aggressively in turns than any lane keep I have seen, and when it can't you will see the limit being reached on the little display so you know you will need to help out on that tight curve.
Experimental mode isn't the best all the time, and SunnyPilot allows hybrid mode which uses regular mode and dynamically switches to experimental mode for stop signs and stop lights.
With SunnyPilot it can even read your car's blind spot monitors to automatically make the lane change hen clear without you having to nudge the wheel.
Some have been playing with concepts of auto navigation too where the car will take exits and turn through intersections for you.
The comma.ai devices have 10W of compute power and the current driving models only use 1W, so there is room to scale to better models with teh current comma devices. There is also talk of supporting more cameras for side views and external GPUs addons with 100W compute for potential FSD level models.
[+] [-] taneq|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] numpad0|2 months ago|reply
Tesla Autopilot was always available, but they were as sketchy as it always had been. Shoving the head into road barriers and fire trucks with rear ends that were less car looking especially to pre-LLM image recognition models.
OpenPilot also allow retrofits. People who own 2017-2023ish cars, shipped between the times after self driving hype took off and before command signature enforcement was widely implemented, can DIY self driving without re-buying the whole car, put aside whether it's legal or whether you should.
[+] [-] unknown|2 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] CamperBob2|2 months ago|reply
It also times out very quickly when traffic comes to a complete standstill, requiring manual intervention to get going again, and it doesn't give any indication to the driver when that occurs.
If these things bothered me much more than they do, I'd be interested in comma.ai as a possible solution. As it stands, the OEM radar cruise control is "Eh, good enough, I guess."
[+] [-] sandworm101|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pkaeding|2 months ago|reply
And people think that is a good thing?
[+] [-] testfoobar|2 months ago|reply
Comma's website links to a 7 year old reddit thread: https://comma.ai/support#will-my-insurance-cover-my-car-with...
As a driver, if in an accident, could someone reasonably assert that you were not paying attention?
[+] [-] zeroq|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sitharus|2 months ago|reply
If you have a collision and your vehicle is judged at fault by whatever authority does it in your area the you are liable.
[+] [-] overfeed|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hahahahhaah|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] WithinReason|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] wing-_-nuts|2 months ago|reply
We don't yet have the legal framework to say 'Sue company x, it wasn't my fault!' You get sued, then you have a very uphill battle to turn around and try to sue the company that provided the 'self driving' functionality because companies put all sorts of 'I totally accept liability for using this' in the T&C of their products.
[+] [-] nomel|2 months ago|reply
#31 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwcYp-XT7UI
#132 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L3gNaAVjQ4
#387 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNrTrx42DGQ
[+] [-] jimmar|2 months ago|reply
https://comma.ai/openpilot
[+] [-] bhadass|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] _blk|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ripped_britches|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] knowitnone3|2 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] frakkingcylons|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Mountain_Skies|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rvz|2 months ago|reply
People here have no idea they are looking at a robotics and AI company which that is Comma.ai
[+] [-] srameshc|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ranon|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ActorNightly|2 months ago|reply
Tesla on the other hand basically went on Musk infinite wisdom and said "humans only need eyes to drive, so we are going to do cameras only". Their methodology is essentially end to end - i.e take a sequence of frames, and train a model to predict where the car is going to go based on human driving data.
Comma Ai basically followed Tesla, except they did so with a much more hacked together approach. Their final product is good, but there is a reason Waymo is winning.
Geohot, holding the title for being #1 simp for Musk, of course subscribed to that philosophy.
[+] [-] micw|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rovr138|2 months ago|reply
They sell the device without firmware and you have to acquire and install it yourself to bypass government regulations.
Or something like that.
[+] [-] whazor|2 months ago|reply
But you would probably need to sell a car together with Comma integrated. And also test every update as well.
[+] [-] croisillon|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] wffurr|2 months ago|reply
I really like my 2017 Chevy Bolt except that it doesn't have ACC. I wish I was comfortable installing a Comma on it, but it requires a gas pedal interceptor [2], and I'm not willing to do that to a car that I transport my family in.
[1]: https://data.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/... [2]: https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/wiki/comma-pedal
[+] [-] sergiotapia|2 months ago|reply
Is it FSD basically?
Is it just lane assist?
Can I put an address in a map and it takes me there?
Very hard to just get these concrete answers, maybe they just take the newbie experience for granted and assume people know these answers. Anyone who owns one of these can answer? Thank you!
[+] [-] zie|2 months ago|reply
If you use Sunnypilot or one of the other friendly forks, you can do more, but it's not (currently) to the state of Tesla's FSD.
Personally, I recommend buying it if you do a lot of road trips. It's amazing for that. In/around town it's only useful if you have a lot of stop and go traffic, like if you live in LA or other large car-centric city with a big commute.
[+] [-] guyfromfargo|2 months ago|reply
No it’s not FSD. There is no navigation at all, you’re correct that it’s “just lane assist”. But the lane assist is next level.
I take a few 1,000 mile plus road trips every year and the comma pays for itself every time. Using the stock lane assist, I’m constantly correcting it. The stock assist tries to take an exit, doesn’t handle curves well at all, and any construction or unusual road conditions it won’t work at all.
With the Comma, on the highway it’s basically FSD. On my last 1000 mile trip I never had to disengage, only to pass and make turns.
The biggest advantage is Comma allows you to be completely hands off the wheel. Where lane assist forces you to hold the wheel at all times.
[+] [-] jackmhny|2 months ago|reply
at https://comma.ai/support#what-is-openpilot
[+] [-] justapassenger|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] LorenDB|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] LoganDark|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rootusrootus|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] numpad0|2 months ago|reply
So a 1920s Fords are out, and 2035 BYD flying cars with post-quantum cryptographic command signature enforcement are out too. Toyota bZ sits somewhere in the middle of those. IIRC they got past some types of Toyota security keys but not all.
[+] [-] julianeon|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] t1234s|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] alephnerd|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] defrost|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] adeebshihadeh|2 months ago|reply
never heard of anyone asking for anything like that