Prominent ex-hacker George Hotz cancelled his work on a commercial aftermarket system for self-driving cars after federal regulators expressed reservations over its safety. Some months later, Hotz has come up with what he believes is a way around the problem: Open-sourcing the system's software and the plans for its hardware components, as IEEE Spectrum reports:
The system can turn a car that already has some smart features, such as radar, into a semi-autonomous vehicle, with features for lane keeping assistance and adaptive cruise control. In its current state, the system is just as effective as version 7 of Tesla's self-driving system, he added.
Yet Hotz's system remains nascent in other ways. For example, at this time it only supports certain Honda and Acura models. Getting more vehicle support is where Hotz expects the open-source community to play a big role. As for the business model, he described it as such to IEEE:
How can you profit by giving away code?
It’s similar to the way Android makes money: They give away things for free but encourage you to use Google services. We plan to encourage you to become part of the comma.ai network and eventually provide you with services. We think of Tesla as the [Apple] iOS; we want to be [Google] Android. In the beginning, iOS was ahead, but now it’s a tossup. And there certainly seems there should be room for two players—one using the walled-garden approach, the other providing software and the network.
One could argue that a self-driving car system, with all its implications surrounding safety, isn't quite the same thing as a smartphone OS. And indeed, during a press conference announcing the open source project, Hotz freely stated that going open source was also a strategy to thwart state and federal regulators, as the Verge reported.
"[The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration] only regulates physical products that are sold,” Hotz said. “They do not regulate open source software, which is a whole lot more like speech.” He went on to say that “if the US government doesn't like this [project], I’m sure there are plenty of countries that will.”
The system's Github page says the software should be considered as in an alpha stage of development, for "research purposes only" and is "not a product."
Any open source project thrives or fails based on the amount of developer interest it supports, and so far it's early days for Hotz's effort. It will also be crucial for the project to put in place a solid governance framework and code quality program if and when it reaches a 1.0 release. Just because a project is open-source is no guarantee of code quality.
But overall, there's cause for concern here. When it comes to self-driving car software, "safety regulators need to step in strongly," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Steve Wilson. "Software will determine the safety of a car more than its airbags or impact resistance. They will be met with the usual arguments about regulations inhibiting innovation, but you cannot be allowed to modify your own self-driving car when it might endanger the public."
"The regulators will win, and hopefully they will win in advance of actual fatalities forcing the issue," Wilson says. "Buggy software can kill many more people than an exploding gas tank. We cannot have a software version of the Ford Pinto."
