The kids these days: Brevan Jorgenson, a college
senior, has built a self-driving car using $700 in parts and free access
to hardware designs and software. He has been driving it around
successfully, and even taking his grandmother for a ride.
Is it
legal, you might wonder? That are plenty of rules for automakers
building autonomous vehicles, and enough regulatory inquisitiveness to
keep parts suppliers from selling kits. But for a garage tinkerer who
puts it all together, there appear to be few constraints.
Brevan Jorgenson made his Civic self-driving for $700 in parts (Photo via MIT Tech Review)
Open-source software, free plans
Jorgenson is a senior at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. He has a 2016 Honda Civic,
our favorite compact car and the only one that’s compatible with a DIY
self-drive kit, other than the Civic’s twin, the Acura ILX. He told his
story to MIT Review.
Comma.ai,
a San Francisco startup, was creating a $999 hardware device that could
upgrade a handful of cars so they could steer themselves and follow
stop-and-go traffic. It would hack into the car’s on-board sensors,
including the adaptive cruise control radar, and extend or amplify
features already on the car, according to founder George Hotz. It wasn’t
intended for the driver to be uninvolved with the car. Hotz also made
the claim the device is “about on par with Tesla Autopilot” in
functionality — meaning, perhaps, that it works well but there might be a
fatal accident in the offing.
That got the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration super-interested. In late October 2016, he got a tough-guy letter from NHTSA
telling him he could be in deep doo-doo and he needed to be “aware of
and in full compliance with your legal responsibilities to ensure
vehicle safety before introducing this product into commerce.”
Hotz
promptly cancelled plans for the physical product. Shortly after that,
Comma.ai put online, free, plans for the hardware device, the Neo; a
components list; and software source code. Jorgenson immediately
downloaded the information and got to work. By January he the car up and
running.
What it is, and how legal it is
The Neo system
is built from a OnePlus 3 Android phone, the now-free Openpilot
software, a circuit board linking the Neo and the car’s electronics, and
a 3D-printed case.
Since then, Neodriven, a Los Angeles startup, has started selling a fully built Neo working off Openpilot for $1,495.
As
for legality, MIT Technology Review quoted University of South Carolina
law prof Bryant Walker Smith, who said laws at both the federal and
state level don’t target individual hobbyists and tinkerers who want to
maintain and upgrade their cars. He added that a car might be legal with
homemade upgrades, but if there was a crash, the owner/operator might
still be in a tough spot in a civil liability suit.
It’s possible
insurance companies might add yet one more paragraph to their list of
coverage exclusions, this time not covering cars made autonomous. In the
1990s, with the growth in popularity of “track days” at racetracks,
insurers said coverage was void if you were driving on a racetrack.
Others
are trying to add specific autonomous features to cars, for instance to
recognize and slow for stop signs, or warn drivers of impending rear
collisions. Such cars would most would benefit X-by-wire
(non-mechanical) gas and brake pedals, and steer-by-wire. Many cars have
throttle-by-wire, only one car (Infiniti Q50) has steer by wire, and no
car yet has brake-by-wire.
By Bill Howard
From ExtremeTech.
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