This Open-Source Device Makes Any Car Self-Driving
This is, practically speaking, a 7-year-old smartphone, but it's one that can drive hundreds of cars autonomously. Back in 2018, I bought my first big boy car, a Tesla Model 3 Performance. Now, at the time, electric cars were still a foreign concept to most people, and Tesla was really expected to fail. But after driving that car for just a day, I knew they had something special, that they would change the automotive industry in both hardware and software. And looking at Tesla's success and how other automakers in many ways are still racing to catch up, well I'd say that I was right.
But I was also a purchaser of Tesla's $8,000 full self-driving package, and I became increasingly skeptical of Elon Musk's autonomous driving claims, especially given that it had become clear that he'd been outright lying for several years. Now when I finally did get my hands on the FSD Beta three and a half years ago, I found technically impressive, but full self-drive it could not, falling far short of promised capabilities and almost killing me multiple times. With the promise of revolutionary software fading, I realized that's kind of what had kept me committed to the brand to begin with.
And so when I first drove a Rivian in 2021, a luxurious vehicle that solved every fit and finish complaint I had with my Tesla while offering genuine capability for adventure, I was smitten. We've done everything from off-roading and camping to road tripping, and I don't really see myself going back. The Cybertruck certainly didn't win me over. But here's the irony: after leaving Tesla, I did find myself missing even their basic autopilot. My Rivian is terrible at even simple lane keeping, let alone full self-driving, which has gotten substantially better since those early betas. And the chasm between Tesla's lead over the rest has only grown larger. Don't believe me? Well, good, you shouldn't. Because to be honest, I haven't been in an FSD
capable vehicle in quite a while. Until today, right now. Because clearly I'm in one. This is a 2022 Model 3 with hardware 3 and FSD 12.6.4. That is the latest version for hardware 3 vehicles. Now, hardware 4 does have a later version, but this isn't a hardware 4 vehicle. It's a hardware 3 vehicle. And one of the great things about this system, let's just start driving, is that you can
purchase these cars now if you're willing to accept quite a bit of mileage for less than $20,000. And for less than $20,000 to have a car that in theory promises to drive itself, that's pretty impressive. Will it? So far so good. It's surreal kind of just sitting here and having the car do everything for you. And yet so far it's been really pretty comfortable, way more comfortable than it was the last time I tried it.
Turning right. It's getting over sooner than I would have, but probably good behavior, to be honest. Okay, now we do have a dip coming up. Is it going to slow down for that? No. That was fast. I would not have taken it that quickly. But it handled this turn very nicely.
no lane markings or anything and it did a great job coming up on a stop sign will it do a real stop yes that is no longer a california stop which the last time i tried fsd very much was it'd come down to like three miles an hour and then it just blazed through it does like to speed and you can regulate the max speed with the scroll wheel but it does kind of use it as a suggestion just because it's The set speed doesn't mean that it'll go that fast. And also when it needs to perform a maneuver like pass, it will exceed that as well. Here's a roundabout.
These are kind of tricky. We've got some traffic coming here. I'm still creeping forward, but I am yielding. Okay.
All right. All right. We've got a lot of traffic. It looks like it's going to get lucky and there's going to be a bit of break in traffic. That wasn't too hard. Made it easy on you.
You're welcome, Tesla. but still handling it competently. It signals as it exits the roundabout, which is good behavior. That was a bit of an aggressive brake, but because this truck didn't signal, and it cut pretty close to pass it, but it didn't hit it. Didn't hit it. There's a lot going on here. We've got parked trucks, we've got pedestrians, we've got a car in front of us, we've got a car reversing up there. It's so nicely controlled. There's just a couple miles per hour, but it's
It's doing well. Nope, I'm taking over. That would have been way too aggressive. Oh, all right. Yeah, dips and bumps. Doesn't seem to want to slow down.
Look at that. Went around that UPS truck quite nicely. Crossed the center line in order to do it, but it signaled. Oh, it slowed down really nicely into there.
See, so it's weird. Some bumps it handles well, some it doesn't. That was good, though.
Is it going to park? No. It goes right in between the two spots. We've arrived at our destination. Now, because I'm at the curb, I have to reverse the vehicle. This is a hardware three limitation. Hardware four is capable of reversing,
but this build is not. So I'm just going to reverse. Okay, this is pretty tricky. We've got two lanes of traffic coming in each direction. The speed limit on this street, I believe, is, oh yeah 40 which means people are driving 50 so and we've got this dip oh but there's no traffic at all we made it easy on this thing well i guess it's coming up okay all right all right it should go right now that's what i would have done but it didn't it's a little too hesitant okay now we've got a uh some cars coming in this direction some cars coming in this direction this is a good challenge Ooh. Uh, I would not have done that. Uh, they may well have had to slow down for me. They didn't honk, but I, I would have done that turn, but I would have blazed it. I suppose I should mention
that this build of FSD is hands off. As long as my eyes are looking at the road, I'm good to go. I don't got to touch anything, which makes it so much more relaxing, a little bit more terrifying, but so much more relaxing. How can it be both at the same time? I don't know. You tell me. And if I had to guess, because we're getting off at the next highway exit, it'll probably just stay in this lane indefinitely. But what you can do with this build of FSD is signal and it'll get over. I've got a car that's entering my blind spot and it's going to wait until it's out of the way. And then it makes the lane change, which is great.
And yeah, I can dictate to it when to change lanes, but it also does that by itself. And that's not new to FSD. That's part of Tesla's enhanced autopilot stack. It's been around since 2018. It's been around for a long, long, long time. It's going left again. I didn't tell it to do that, but it's deciding that it wants to pass the student driver. Here's the thing though, our exit is coming up in one mile and we're
in the furthest leftmost lane. So, what is it to do? One eternity later. Uh, wow. That's a long wait to decide to start getting over. So it's got a boogie across
five lanes. Again, it's not rush hour, so it would be okay. But that's one of the things that FSD still misses. It's not context-aware. This is a tricky, tricky situation. We've got some construction here. Typically, there are two right-hand turn lanes. Right now, there is only one. We've got some traffic that any second is going to get the green light. Yep. And so they're going to be coming. We're turning right, and we're also going to have to get over two lanes of traffic
into a left-hand turn-only lane almost instantly. Right there. So we've got a boogie now. And this is one that is tricky for human drivers, so I'll be interested to see if this can pull it off. Gets even worse when the light turns red and traffic starts to pile up. Okay, the coast is now clear, and it goes as soon as there's an opening. Good job. But you've got to get over two lanes.
Buddy. We missed it. Come on, it was wide open. You could have made that. Hamburger time. That sounds good.
double double animal style extra toast add chilies that's the that's the order french fry well done dude you missed the in and out burger what we're at 7-eleven you expect me to walk through all the foliage i'm not doing that this is where you go to eat your where are you going this is where you go to what are you doing This is where you go to eat the In-N-Out Burger after you get it in shame so that the other people in the parking lot Don't see you eating in your car because you didn't want to go inside because you want to watch a show on your Tesla What? How did you How do you think that was good? Hamburger I want you We already have to go to our next place on the map It won't let me stop I'm not in control Help! You probably should have That's probably a bad joke Sorry I'm fine my car is kidnapping me my back hurts this is no kia ev9 seat i'll tell you that much in addition to loving the kia ev9 my wife loves her Gen 2 smart ring from today's sponsor RingConn unlike some wearables that look like a prop from Star Trek RingConn Gen 2 actually looks like a ring and a thin one at that it's the first smart ring that tracks sleep apnea you wear it overnight and the app will give you a full AHI report. No extra steps, no weird breathing tubes, just a ring. And like I mentioned, it's tiny, like actually tiny. The world's thinnest and lightest smart ring at just two millimeters thick and two to three grams in weight. You forget you're even wearing it until you wash dishes, swim, or shower, only to realize, oh, I don't need to take it off. It's IP68 rated and can go 100 meters underwater. And the battery life? 10 to 12 days per charge,
buddy, and if you throw it in the included case between wares, you're looking at over 150 days of use. You basically never have to think about battery. That's not so with a smartwatch. Now in addition to their flagship, Ringconn has also released their Gen 2 Air. It's got the same AI health monitoring platform, which tracks sleep, stress, vitals, activity, and even menstrual cycles, but at $199, it's a more excessively priced option. So yeah, real insight, zero bulk. Check out Ringconn today using the link and code below. I haven't yet felt unsafe. Sometimes it's doing things that I'm like, well, that was kind of silly. Why'd you do that? But it's not doing something where I'm,
I feel like I'm in jeopardy, which is a big difference from the last time I tried FSD. Beautiful. Look at that. Very, very well done. But then there's other instances, like in a parking lot where it's like, beautiful, comfortable, fabulous. Man,
it accelerates quickly. Love that. Now on the highway, this is very controlled and comfortable. It's sitting in the middle of the lane. It's just traveling at a rational speed. It makes the lane changes quite human-like. I mean, go figure. That's the idea of neural nets
trained on human drivers, right? But it's not. So, gotta get over. Performing an action. It's very casual, which I really, really like. It makes it so much more comfortable because it just feels like I'm being driven by a fairly confident Uber. It's amazing. I mean, a few years ago, this felt like the worst teenager driver ever. And now it feels like a four-star Uber driver
who has mild fits of narcolepsy. And frankly, when you're sitting here letting the car do your thing, I'm less aggravated by the people around me. I'm not like, oh, it's just nice. It's casual. I can drink my Sodi Pop while keeping direct eye contact with the road so as not to disturb the cameras. Hot moms drive EV9s. I have that on good authority.
We've got a yellow flashing arrow, which means we need to yield. There is oncoming traffic, and it's handling itself just fine. I would pull into the intersection. It still doesn't seem to have that tendency, and I suppose the thinking is, well, if the light turns red, you don't want to be in the middle of the intersection, but that's why you do want to be in the middle of the intersection, because then if the light turns red, you can just, you know, go through before the intersection clears.
But, yeah, it's waiting. It's thinking about it. We're in the middle of the crosswalk, so it better go if it decides it. There we go. It's just so unexciting because it just does the right thing. Turn left. Oh, dog! Dog!
Whoa! Hey! That's a real-world scenario. What are you doing, buddy? don't come over here go back home that was good I didn't stop I would have but I didn't stop that was all the car well one spare dog later and I think I've had enough that's pretty good shockingly good so it really isn't a league of its own but it's still not there yet and while 60% of Americans want highway lane keep assist for the road trips because a lot of road trip when we do just 13% of surveyed Americans want to own a self-driving vehicle. Now, this hesitation likely comes down to familiarity, as these things often do, but it did get me wondering, does anything even come close to Tesla's free included autopilot highway assist system? This is a Kia EV9, my wife's new car. Well, new to us, new to her. It's technically a year old, but because it's a Kia, We bought this one year and 14,000 miles after the first owner for $30,000 less than what they paid for. Thank you, depreciation.
And what we get is ultimately, in my opinion, a really excellent electric vehicle because it's based on Hyundai's eGMP platform, a really tried and true platform. 800-volt architecture and charges crazy fast. The car is quite quick. And the packaging on this car is remarkable.
There is not a car in the industry, on the market, period, that is this size with more internal volume, particularly in the second row. I'm six foot four, my wife is six foot, and we have a newborn baby. And I don't know if you've seen, but car seats are freaking deep. They sit off the seat quite a lot. And even in my R1S from Rivian, which is a much larger vehicle, we have to hunch forward and put our seat position where we wouldn't really want it. Not so in this car. Pretty remarkable. And because it's a Hyundai, it also has access to Hyundai's HDA2 system, Highway Driving Assist 2. And, well, to enable it, I just push this button when I'm on
the highway. I can take my hands off, and the car is now in control. Not only does it do lane centering and traffic-aware cruise control, which is radar-based. I should mention the sensor suite, I guess. We've got four corner radars, a forward-facing radar, some ultrasonics, and just a singular forward-facing camera. That's very unusual and what would appear to be old low quality tech
but as you'll see the performance of this is quite excellent. That is a hands-on system but when you're on the freeway it doesn't really ask you to put your hands on the system very often at all. That is until you decide to make a lane change and a lane change you can in fact make if you don't have a car in your blind spot which I presently do so I'm going to increase the set speed and of course as I do that, the car next to me decides to go faster as well, I can just push the turnstock, and as long as my hand is gently resting on the wheel, the vehicle will perform the lane change by itself. Once it gets in the new lane, it just automatically resumes. That functionality is present any time you have this little logo here with the two lanes. It also, however, respects
the blind spots. This is not done, as far as I'm aware, with vision. It's done with ultrasonics and with actually side-facing radars. And so what I can do is if I have a vehicle in my blind spot, which I will do here shortly, even if it's beside me and the vehicle no longer displays it going forward, it still won't permit me to make a lane change. I've got a vehicle here at my right.
And if I try to change lanes, it says, no, no. It shows me the blind spot camera and it waits until the vehicle has passed, at which point it will make the lane change. Again, my hand is just touching because it requires capacitive touch in order to change lanes. But it changes lanes quite confidently. It does it nicely. Even if I do it into a lane where there is a vehicle, the traffic-aware cruise control, I think, is a little bit more aggressive at correction that I'd like, but that is admittedly a setting. There's an example of an area where it doesn't do a great job. I just kind of got cut off a little bit,
and the vehicle massively slowed down. You get that in most traditional systems because, again, This is not using stereoscopic cameras. All right, here's a fairly aggressive turn.
How does it handle it? Pretty nice. There's a little bit of steering torque kind of unevenness, but it's better than most systems. It's not going to make you car sick at all, I don't think.
Not bad. Not great, but not bad. Like the old Tesla Autopilot before they started using the cabin camera to monitor driver attention, there is no in-cabin camera system. So the only thing that it's checking to make sure that I'm looking at the road is just occasionally ensuring that I'm touching the steering wheel capacitively.
I haven't touched it in a while, and it's still not bugging me to put my hands on there. Now, it does bug you to put your hands on fairly often when you're not on the highway. And yes, I should mention, this system works when you're not on the highway. You'll notice that on city streets, really only one thing disappears, this icon, which means no automatic lane changes. But longitudinal control and telemetry, steering and acceleration, those still remain. And what's really neat is that I can drive the vehicle hands-free while controlling the speed myself.
I don't have to be in a cruise control environment, which a lot of cars are incapable of doing. Something that I really, really like for city driving, where I'm on a straight road or an occasional curve, I'm going to sit here. I control the speed. I don't have to rely on the jerky radar.
But the steering wheel, as long as there's lines on the ground, has no problem staying within them. But if you don't have lane lines, sorry, buddy. No lane lines, no luck. If you don't have paint on the ground, this thing will not follow anything.
Neural nets are required and not present. Look out! You'll curb this thing if you're not careful. But how does it handle freeway exits, you ask? Well, I suppose this is our opportunity to find out. I am now in a second generation Rivian R1S, notable because it brings with it hands-off highway driving as part of its Rivian Autonomy Platform Plus. standard on all Rivian vehicles and it uses a combination of hardware and software to make this all happen. 11 cameras, four corner radars, one front
facing radar and dual Nvidia Drive Oren cameras. Unlike Tesla Rivian seems to believe that sensor fusion, a combination of multiple sensors providing inputs is important for a good on-road experience. But similar to Tesla they are using a local inference model and it's looking for errors and reporting or unusual that then sends to Rivian to train a larger model, which is then distilled and sent back down to the smaller in-car inference model. So it's kind of this flywheel of improvement. So what does it do today? Well, I can double pull back on the drive stock, and it will enter lane-keeping mode. This isn't new, but what is is those flashing hands.
When those flashing hands are present, I can take my hands off the wheel, and it says Enhanced Highway Assist On. I'm expected to keep my eyes on the road, but my hands can do whatever they want. And you might think to yourself, okay, big difference. But it actually is a big difference.
When you spend hours on the road, being able to take your hands fully off the wheel and just watch the road makes it so much more relaxing and less fatiguing to drive. Now, it is checking to make sure that I'm paying attention. There's a camera inside the rearview mirror that is a driver monitoring system. And if I look over here for a bit too long, my dash display will say, hey, please keep your eyes on the road.
But as long as they're facing forward, I'm good to go. And you can see that despite this Tesla waffling all back and forth, boy, they should really turn autopilot on. I am nicely centered here in the lane. It's very comfortable. There are no micro jitters like you can expect to find sometimes on some lesser lane keeping systems. There's no rubber banding.
It doesn't find itself biased far towards one side of the lane or the other. It's just comfortable. It's confident.
It can even make lane changes. I'm coming up on this semi, but I can push down on the turn signal indicator. and it will change lanes. It's not just doing it laissez-faire either. It's making sure that there
is no obstacles in my blind spot or in the lane next to me and I can prove that by trying to lane change directly into this semi. It won't do it. It'll say that it's waiting. It continues to wait and once we pass the semi and it determines that the coast is clear, it makes the lane change. But I'm also traveling very quickly and approaching this Subaru. It doesn't matter. The vehicle very and very sensitively reduces the speed. A lot of times you'll find the instance where radars are trying to maintain a fixed set distance and then you move into another lane or someone cuts you off and it's like, whoa.
No, this has a little bit of tolerance to get a little bit closer so that it can slowly back off the throttle. But now we have experienced the issue. Enhanced highway assist not available in this area. It's freaking out at me and says, keep your hands on the wheel. So for whatever reason in this section of road, can't do that. It's still running a local inference model, but it seems to be falling back on Rivian's mapping.
That's not even the worst of it, though. There are sections of roadway where the vehicle straight up refuses to drive autonomously. And unfortunately, these large swaths of unmapped areas just make it a not very enjoyable experience.
This is I-15. It's a major interstate, and this construction has been completed for the better part of two years. I mean, the road's already bumpy again, and yet it hasn't been mapped. It just says highway assist unavailable on this road.
It'll turn on in a couple miles, but to have to undo and redo and redo and undo, and some sections are hands-free, but some aren't, but some can't do it at all, it's really quite annoying. So I can turn it back on now, but it's not in hands-free. It still wants my hand on the wheel.
Now, Rubien says this is temporary, that they're going to fix it into the future, but it's still kind of a bummer. It also cannot handle freeway exits or interchanges. If I try to get over here, it will change lanes, but then the car will instantly say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're about to get off the freeway, take control of the vehicle. It continues to lane keep up until that point, but if I ignore the car, things get scary real fast. Yeah, it's clearly out of its element. All right, so that's highway performance, but what about on-road city performance? Well, each system is going to have varying levels of success, except for this system, the Rivian Gen 2 vehicle, because it can't do anything in the city. Quite literally nothing.
I have traffic-aware cruise control, and that's it. No steering, no lane-keeping, nothing. It cannot do anything at all. And wow, that radar is not even good in the city. Now, Rivian does say that's going to change, and they anticipate that over the next couple of years, that same neural stack that they're utilizing to drive on highway will come downstream to on-road.
And I'm sure hoping that they can, because this is frankly embarrassing. So that's the best of what the market has to offer on new vehicles. But what if there was a way to retrofit your existing car with better autonomy? Would such a thing be any good? Well buddy, there is. And yes, it's actually fantastic. This is the Comma 3X. Now what may look like a dashcam is in fact a fully self-contained autonomous
compute module. It's got a 6-inch 1080p OLED display, three cameras which provide 360 degrees of vision-based coverage. It's got a seven-year-old Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor for compute, which is mighty old. You've got LTE, Wi-Fi, precision GPS, and there's an onboard microcontroller that actually talks to your car, which it does over the CAN bus. And so I suppose we should probably talk
about cars, shouldn't we? The Kama 3X runs OpenPilot, an advanced open source driver assistance system. And thanks to this open source approach, there is huge community support, with both third party hardware and software branches making for over 300 officially supported car models, like my generation 1 Rivian, and nearly double that unofficially, like my wife's EV9. And while While Kama develops the driving models, it is the community that keeps adding support for new vehicles every week.
Now installation, it ranges from dead simple to still pretty easy. My Rivian is one of the more complicated installs out there, but even so it took just 30 minutes. Two connectors into my vehicle, a bit of clever cable management with my pillar cover and headliner, and that was it. Okay, so I've got the Kama 3x on my windshield and I am here on the highway, which is where this system is designed to perform best. And to enable OpenPilot, all I have to do is push down once
on the drive stock. And now OpenPilot is in full control of both my vehicle steering and speed. Except for it's not really, because I'm not using OpenPilot. Ha! Yeah, I'm using SunnyPilot. This is an also open source upstream branch of OpenPilot. And what it does is it adds a bunch of functionality for kind of half-baked ports, which is the state that the Rivian is in. So right now,
Inside of official OpenPilot, all I have is steering. It relies on the Rivian for traffic-aware cruise control using the vehicle's built-in radar, which I've always found to be pretty terrible. SunnyPilot places some buttons on screen which allow us to control speed because what we need to do to give OpenPilot functionality is input from these steering wheel buttons that are just hidden in the CAN bus somewhere. We don't know where they are yet. We'll find them eventually, but for right now, you have to use SunnyPilot if you want to control speed.
And because we're controlling speed within Sunny Pilot, you might be wondering, well, is it tapped into the radar? No, this is all vision-based, just like Tesla FSD and Tesla Autopilot on the highway. And so you would expect this to be a bit jittery and confused, but it's actually quite excellent. I can follow to safe distance, I can increase my speed, and you'll notice that on the freeway, it's pretty freaking good. There isn't a decent amount of wind outside right now, which is not ideal as anybody knows for driving at speed.
And yet, I have full comfort in the system's capabilities. I'm not required to put my hands on the steering wheel. I can just sit back and relax, and I can also perform lane changes. Although, not lane changes into my blind spot. If I turn my turn signal on, and I tap the steering wheel, it will move over. And it does slow down because it detects a car in front of me.
a little bit more aggressively than Tesla Full Self Driving would, but frankly, quite a bit better than you would get on the systems that we were trying previously, in both the Kia and the Gen 2 Rivian. It does not have blind spot indicators, which is not so good. If I turn on my turn signal and somebody is right next to me, it'll just crash into them.
And if you needed proof of that, you shouldn't, but here you go. If I turn on my turn signal and say, go for it, yeah, it'll run right into that truck. There is functionality to detect whether or not there is something in the blind spot over can.
Some vehicles can support it, some vehicles can't. Right now, Rivian can't. So if you want to change into a blind spot, you've got to do a head check and make sure that there is nobody there. But in theory, into the future and with other vehicles, you can change lanes just fine. You can see that the vehicle ahead of me is braking very quickly and unlike my Rivian system Which would have slammed on the radar at the last second that was a quick but controlled deceleration Really honestly very very good Now like I mentioned you can control your own speed But you can even control steering without interrupting the system altogether, which is really nice This is super uncommon on lane keep assist So if it's doing something I don't like or I want to take a turn more aggressively I can just kind of brake the steering and you'll see that this little blue box disappears when it's gray It means I'm in control and then as soon as I let go system takes back over the steering It's pretty dang slick. It has the same thing for speed as well. I can tap the accelerator
I can tap the brake based on my settings It'll stop or pause its own input and then as soon as I let off the system takes back over this makes it really nice as a driving Companion, it's not a mode where my brain has to think okay. It's time to engage the system It's just always kind of running in the background and whenever it's doing something I don't like I just Mildly take over corrected and then it resumes right where it left off pretty dang cool This touch-and-go traffic is honestly really impressive because the vehicle is already slowing down You can see my speed here, but it's slowing up right as there's a gap This is way better than most vehicles when it comes to radar cruise control even the gen 2 rivian It's just slowing down very slowly And then as soon as it gets a little space it speeds right back up This is honestly, if it were a human driving, I don't think you'd get it this smooth. This is by far the closest system to Tesla full self-driving on the highway that we've experienced so far. And is it worse? Yeah, I'm going to get cut off here and it's going to slow down.
Wow. I take it back. Maybe it's just as good on the freeway. Even on roads with a lot of construction and confusion, it ain't shabby. We're getting off the freeway here. The lane lines are pretty wickedly bad.
and yet the system steers just fine. Will it slow down though? That I'm not so sure of because it really kind of maintains a set speed. At the end of the day, this is designed to be a driver assist, not a primary driver function. The lane changes because they're user controlled are really seamless.
Just push down on the drive stock and it does its thing. It's confident, it's precise, it works really, really well. And in general, I think working well kind of the highlight of this system. It's shocking how smooth it is, how confident it has become.
I don't really have any worries zoning out a little bit with this system. I've never had it sear out of the lane. I've never had it do something abruptly. It really is just about as good as it gets for on-highway driving. I hate adjusting the speed like this, but you win some, you lose some. When I first drove that Gen 2 Rivian, I was really jealous because I thought, man, this is what my car has always been lacking. But now that I've put it into my car for the cost of less than a flagship smartphone, I'm feeling pretty good about that purchase.
It is running a local inference model like Rivian, like Tesla. Unlike those systems, however, I can choose what bottle I'm running. If I come into the settings here, and then I go down to software, you can see that I'm currently on the Filet-O-Fish model, but there are a bunch of models that all have cute little names that are trained on different data sets from different drivers with different driving attributes and different regions etc they're trained via a supercomputer and then distilled back down to the local model to run in vehicle and what's cool is that open pilot is second only to tesla in the amount of mile volume that they've done in simulation they have hundreds of thousands millions of miles in simulation to improve and train these models and they've gotten really really good over the last even just six months to a year where i think the system really excels frankly along with tesla's fsd making it the cream of the crop over everything else is in situations like this where lane lines are not super well defined and or super logically drawn this is an instance where you'll see very shortly the lane lines get a little bit squiggly this would not be something that makes a lot of sense to follow hyper rigidly and so the car just doesn't it stays within the lines but it's not trying to make it like a train track following it perfectly which cheaper systems tend to do and that's because again this is emulating human drivers because that's what it's trained on and boy can you tell when you're on the highway it's just so much more smooth but open pilot doesn't just work on the highways anywhere you've got a road you can enable it it'll by default enable both speed and steering but by pressing the drive stock it will continue to operate the steering while i control the actual vehicle speed acceleration and braking all the same functionality lane changes whatever you want remains the same the thing is when you're on local roads it's not quite as stable now if you're feeling particularly crazy you can enable an alpha experimental mode that does more than just standard lane keeping this in theory is supposed to stop at traffic lights and stop signs it does much better when there's no lines on the road theoretically although we're driving over the line right now and driving over the other line yeah you can see where we're going with this it's not spectacular it's an alpha it's a work in progress we're slowing down for no reason whatsoever why all right let's see if it does the one thing it's supposed to do will you stop at that stop sign uh uh hey hey i'm not touching the brake now did it come to a complete stop no and would it have stopped for cross traffic also no but it's a work in progress it's experimental it's not very good i leave it turned off the fact that it's this good on an eight-year-old smartphone glued to my dashboard no fancy sensors, no radars, no cameras streamlined into the windshield. Literally just a phone that I've glued to the front of the car is remarkably good. And so I have a tendency to believe whatever crazy stuff they say about whatever the future holds because it has no right being as good as it is today. So yeah, Tesla still shows a huge lead in fully
autonomous driving for consumers, but solutions like OpenPilot are incredible given that the software is free, continually improving, and can be added to the car that you already own for about $1,000. Even less if you go with a third-party option or roll your own setup, because that's the beauty of open source, baby. What autonomy features does your car have? Would Open Pilot seem like an intriguing improvement at all? Let me know in the comments down below, but thank you so much for watching, and as always, stay snazzy.
Oh, shoot. Somebody's under arrest. Oh my gosh, what are you doing out of your car? Someone just crashed right now and there's a crash in the opposite direction. We really should not be allowed to drive cars.
2025-05-03 15:54
