I chose the Hyundai Ioniq 5 as my current car specifically because it’s compatible with OpenPilot. It’s been a total game-changer for my driving experience. Just like their tagline says, “make driving chill,” and for me, it truly delivers on that promise.
This reminds me of Waymo's approach to self-driving cars. Paraphrasing, but basically they found that progressively adding self-driving to help human drivers is bad, because it leads to the humans becoming complacent and not paying enough attention. Therefore they decided on an all or nothing approach, where their cars would be only and entirely self-driven.
This always seemed like a bit of bull from waymo. It's not an easy problem to work with existing manufacturers to give a better and or cheaper solution... Especially when there are established competitors with efficient verification and validation processes (that every manufacturer requires).
They decided it wasn't worth explaining that their techniques don't generalise to a driver assist. It would not be good or cheap enough to be worth developing the compliance and integration frameworks.
The first thing Waymo tried building (way back when, circa 2010 or so) was highway based driver assist in the style of Autopilot. They did a ton of testing with it and didn’t like how quickly their testers stopped paying attention despite a ton of instruction not to. I’ve seen clips from these tests.
It’s also possible they shifted direction because the long term vision of robotaxis is much more lucrative.
The thing is, you can tune driver assist to whatever form you like; but then you have a true comparison of function with established competitors.
I just don't believe the approaches for high autonomy (especially at the time) actually could make a cost effective assist system.
And for whatever reason they decided to push the we didn't like the driver behaviour message, rather than actually talking about what was actually plausible to achieve in the driver assist space.
Unless you assume that self-driving software is perfect, no, it really isn't. That's the whole problem - the drivers would get complacent, so when there's an issue, they'd be caught by surprise and wouldn't be able to react.
Isn't the point to pay _no_ attention? The difference is when an accident occurs, was the person in the car at fault for not vigilantly watching everything.
You want the curve of total attention to be always above a baseline human in an unassisted car. The car can do some attention and the human can do some. But if the sum of the two falls below the threshold, you’re in trouble.
You can already do that by just closing your eyes and letting Jesus take the wheel. No, the point is doing so while maintaining safety.
It is materially less safe to operate a ADAS while distracted than driving manually. Humans are exceptionally good drivers on average, only encountering minor crashes on timeframes measured in years to decades. As such, if safety critical ADAS errors occur more frequently than every ~100,000 miles and you are attentive in less than 100% of all such occurrences, you are operating your vehicle multiple times more dangerously than the average driver (which is a number that includes drunks and distracted drivers).
That is why it is critical to deliberately downplay the capabilities, to avoid wishful over-reliance, and enforce strict driver awareness (through techniques such as driver monitoring) to avoid operating multi-ton killing machines in ways that are multiple times more dangerous to the occupants, other drivers, and pedestrians. Without that, people are prone to over-generalization of safety capabilities, extrapolating that a single success means robust, continued success thousands to tens of thousands of times in a row.
That statement from Waymo always struck me as deeply uninsightful because it was really just a more complicated way of saying “self driving systems need to be good enough to drive the car on their own” which isn’t just obvious, but tautological.
"THIS IS ALPHA QUALITY SOFTWARE FOR RESEARCH PURPOSES ONLY. THIS IS NOT A PRODUCT. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR COMPLYING WITH LOCAL LAWS AND REGULATIONS. NO WARRANTY EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED."
> this can be used wherever the driver deems it safe and useful
With the disclaimer that this depends on the location of course. For example, I think in Spain (and probably EU wide?) modifications that affect steering and throttle control would need to undergo local homologation before you're legally allowed to drive with that on public roads at all.
Which, to be honest, makes a lot of sense. I don't think anyone would be happy if cars start using software MVPs automatically controlling throttle and steering while in real traffic.
I mean let’s be frank here. The sort of people who are enthusiastic about this also aren’t going to be stopped by the law especially with the low risk of getting caught.
If I were to personally install this and use it anyways, my biggest worry would be the additional punishment if I cause an accident. Not sure exactly what the punishment is for driving a vehicle you know isn't road worthy, but I bet it aint pretty.
While the chances of getting caught are low, I wouldn't want to risk this for insurance. If you are involved in a crash for any reason I don't think they are going to cover it if you modified this stuff on purpose.
Suppose I deem it safe and useful for my 6yo to drive for a while, using his Xbox controller from the passenger seat.
It is illegal in many countries for a device (or anything else) to obscure any part of the driver's forward view (area swept by wipers). So even without actually controlling the car, we have an unlawful vehicle.
It really bothers me when people make statements like this. I propose a bet:
If you’re so confident this will drive my car into a ditch, then front the money for me to buy a compatible car & this kit. If it drives my car into a ditch, I’ll pay you back double that money.
If a piece of software that has the capacity to kill people is provided without any kind of assurances or warranty with the sole responsibility placed solely on the user, then that already tells me all I need to know, no bet needed to settle it.
Would you buy an angle grinder that's specifically been designed to not have a guard so it can be more useful, made by random contributors on the internet without any official certification? I'll stick with the ones that needed to pass the CE mark and you can sue the company responsible if it chops your arm off thank you very much. They at least have a required level of anxiety needed to patch anything serious knowing the level of responsibility they carry and what's coming if they mess up.
They’re just trying to scare away people who thing they can chuck this on their car and suddenly have a self-driving robot that they don’t have to pay attention to.
It’s my understanding that in addition to the cameras it also uses the sensors already built in to the car which would include blind-spot detection, no?
Some cars that have BSD it will work with. My car uses it, but don't forget the lane changes are not automated by default. A user must turn on the blinker and nudge the wheel by default. Positive BSD sensors read on CAN-BUS will be read by OP and it will not perform the rest of the lane change. This is how it works on my car (albeit, I don't run default so I just need the blinker).
It says my car is supported and my car doesn't have any blind-spot detection, nor does the requirements list that as needed, so maybe it's optional but not required?
