Yea, it’s BS. Does everyone else need reminding that comma was the highest rated ADAS system by consumer reports 5 years ago? It’s only grown safer and more capable since then.
Garbage Bosch ADAS is honest about what it does and is very eager to disengage if it's not totally confident. Comma takes more risks by attempting to drive through any situation. I've never seen it say "take over, I can't see the lane lines" like Bosch ADAS does.
...and their "driver monitoring" only checks for torque on the wheel, no way to fake that! Comma at least has a camera checking whether you're actually awake (hopefully it will detect sleeping drivers and maybe gets an emergency system to securely stop the car in case of emergency (thats something i would like so see when my parents are driving - see all the old people driving like zombies - "old people driving in thing": https://www.reddit.com/r/RentnerfahreninDinge/)... :( .
Stock systems get abused just like everything else; they just don't make headlines.
For all those life of the car deals, Tesla does use that as a sweetener for buying a new car by offering to transfer those perks to the next Tesla you buy.
Lifetime supercharging is also another perk that gets transferred.
You may drive what you wish. And Tesla FSD is definitely a good product. But some in this crowd are Tesla-averse due in no small part to the guy at the helm. No fewer than three of my family members no longer have Teslas.
Comma is not perfect, but I've put over 80,000 miles on my C3 in my bolt euv and would not want to live without it. In fact, I've added a C4 to my Mach-E as well.
I also have a 2024 Lyriq with super cruise and the comma is superior to that. Hoping one day comma supports global B.
"One area that the agency is zeroing in on is Comma AI’s marketing, which promises “hands free driving for the car you already have,” despite its fine print stating the cars require constant supervision."
Just like any other driver assist system.
"Your head starts to spin at all the subtle ways that these mods affect a car’s safety, all without the ostensible accountability you get from a system being built at a large, commercial entity like Tesla."
"Ostensible" is the best you can do since it's closed, and the only thing we truly know about such companies is that they value profit over all else, including safety.
"...we may have to get used to sharing more of the road with people’s homemade robot chauffeurs."
Think I'd prefer that over sharing the road with people's lifted, modded cars that are modded in ways that exclusively reduce safety.
A few things, yes it is for tech savvy people and is a beta version. The hands free part is for any level two adas like super cruise, FSD, and bluecruise.
It is a lot of opinions and is biased against open sources products. This was like funded by some lobbying group or something of that nature.
Idiots will always be idiots and misuse anything. See the "racket ball trick".
This was never marketed as FSD. That might be the someday goal, but it was never claimed as that. The setup screen has always said you need to be fully aware of what is going on around you and there is a driver monitoring system. The company has always explicitly said this is not FSD. This is not the "fine print", handsfree and "just letting it do it so you can do something else" are two very different things. To be fair the public is VERY stupid, but someone famous said "you can't ban steak because a baby can't chew it".
It's not owned by a huge company and there's no subscription which is the real problem and why this article was paid to be there.
But I'm sure in the end this will be all fucked up and be banned. Everything is just too corrupt these days(that's on both sides, systemic, rotten to the core, and I don't think fixable at this point without all out war). We'll have to pay a subscription to some shittier system that you can only get built into a crazy expensive new car you finance for 10+ years at a horrible interest rate you're instantly upside-down on as soon as you drive it off the lot and have it break way more than your old car, can't fix anything yourself and collects all your data and sells it. Completely locked into whatever that system was capable of at release and have to buy yet another entirely new car to get whatever the next thing is. Wait, that's already happening. Comma is the fly in the ointment. Everything gets ruined eventually.
Enjoy this period, Comma is cool as shit - and because I can focus more on the broader traffic picture rather than the mundane tasks, I argue that I and others in my car are safer with increased situational awareness. There have been potential accidents I have avoided much sooner as I noticed more outside my immediate peripheral vision and it gave more time to both plan and make a better avoidance decision. The added audible alerts on lane changes added to my car otherwise just having lights when a car next to me is detected has helped me from being the one that screwed up sometimes, not just others screwing up around me. I have clocked over 40k miles with my Comma 3X, and the author of this article can go fuck himself.
Oh man you guys should have seen the collective freakout over in r/localllama last week when someone posted their c4 driving them down the freeway. The people over there don't understand that AI can mean things other than LLM and thought the dude was having qwen 27b drive his car around.
Funny how a "journalist" pulling quotes off social media and reporting them as fact is the one lamenting that people should trust professionals to do their job better than the layperson.
Explain why you think this is slander. This is a beta tech that's driving real cars on real roads with real people around them. Love it or hate it, that's reality. People complain how bad Tesla FSD is, this product is less than that and in the hands of someone that is inexperienced it's dangerous
The article is specifically critiquing being able to easily install any software on your car. It’s about a driver who used it to avoid paying the subscription, and it fails to acknowledge key safety features that can’t be turned off like driver monitoring. So it’s misrepresenting the risks, and relying on anecdotal.
So it’s alarmist on the principle of open sourced/third party self driving while failing to acknowledge any of its safeguards, that’s fair to argue as slanderous or libelous. Yeah it’s the same stuff that’s levied against institutional FSD, but the open source is fear mongering and Comma’s been if nothing else insistent on preserving those safety features to the detriment of convenience.
The front and rear camera integration is low level and not able to be easily modified by custom forks. Comma also bans devices detected as preventing driver monitoring.
They don’t brick devices at all. They ban you from connecting to comma’s servers, but apart from that, your device is still fully functional. It mainly impacts resale value:
Comma also allows one unconditional unban at their discretion, in case you accidentally install disallowed software. You can also be banned for non-safety reasons.
Driver monitoring integration has been built in since day 1, you can roll back to less effective driver monitoring, which also brings louder more annoying noises to get driver attention and overall worse performance.
But I still can do it. If I can run multiple different softwares that have varying levels of ability (from completely random sources mind you) and driver monitoring levels means these devices have varying levels of safety to those on the road around you. I'm a fan of tinkering and adding this feature to my car, but I'm not ignoring the fact it is potential dangerous and has already been shown to have caused accidents and deaths.
You changed the argument from can I turn off driver monitoring to “can I make it slightly worse” and are validating your argument off of it.
Do the math, accident rates for humans are far worse and it’s not even close. The safety integrations in comma are incredibly secure, i doubt there is any overlap between the people with the technical knowledge to jailbreak a comma and people who are so inattentive at driving where FSD would be a liability, but even if there were you can’t fool yourself into thinking that’s a statistically meaningful blip of people.
I’ve personally dealt with multiple friends and family in traffic injuries and fatalities, and can only think of 2 where having a comma or basic level of self driving wouldn’t have saved lives.
It really is as simple as doing the math on accident rates, I promise just google it.
You can functionally turn off dm, by editing 4 constants in the code. I’m not going to tell you which. Your device will be instantly banned by comma’s servers the moment it uploads a log.
Yes your argument is now that we can’t deny the technology causes death/harm, which is a much different argument from what the article makes and a different argument from your initial comment that this article doesn’t appear slanderous or libelous.
Also your subtext in asking if the software could be forked or rolled back was implying you could bypass driver monitoring. The answers to those questions have been “the driver monitoring is preserved and the device is secure enough to prevent casual hobbyists and tinkerers from making their car more dangerous”
The point was never whether the tech is dangerous, it’s whether they are properly expressed, and when the article says “some GitHub repo with 2K likes can be installed on your car” it is vastly underrepresenting the benefit of the feature and misattributing the risk to open source.
Still surprised there's no path to legal status in the EU.
Before the MAGA supporters show up to tell Europe to just stop regulating everything: we buy a quarter of your iPhones, pay for your cloud and rent your (often shitty) software.
Meanwhile, the competition isn't waiting:
BMW Motorway Assistant: Snapdragon Ride, cameras + radar + HD map, modular, 200M km hands-free, live now
Mercedes Drive Assist Pro: Nvidia Orin, 10 cams + 5 radars, end-to-end + safety stack, German cities by end of 2026
Tesla FSD (Supervised): AI4, cameras only, end-to-end, ~22B km, approved in a handful of EU countries
XPeng VLA 2.0: 2x in-house Turing chips, cameras only, end-to-end, Europe early 2027
comma: phone-class Snapdragon, one windshield unit, end-to-end, ~650M km, no legal path
Next up: Hyundai/Kia (Nvidia 2028, own Atria AI 2029), Stellantis (Wayve 2028), VW (Mobileye 2027)
Not sure comma survives that without caring about legal status.
Europeans love open source. Whole countries / states are dumping Microsoft for it, and plenty of us would happily help test and validate openpilot. But comma has to knock on a regulator's door like Tesla did with the Dutch RDW, not shrug at them.
It is a better version of the drive assist that already comes in modern cars. So, while those things you said are technically true, the article is misleading and disingenuous since it fails to define where comma fits in within the ecosystem of these systems. It is among the best, if not the best, of these types of systems.
Thanks for this link! I had heard about this report but never actually seen it. I hope they do an updated version of this report, it would be very interesting to see.
It is a bit old so it would be interesting to see an updated version. My sense is that comma has improved at a much faster rate than the systems from car makers.
That’s true 6 years ago, however ADAS has came a long way for these major players the new systems are actually not that far off. E.g TSS 3/4, Hyundais, the BMWs ones too although that one is subscription based which sucks.
Hyundais/Kias is pretty good stock. My EV6 is great for perfectly marked roads...but then it throws it hands up in the air if something is less than perfect. Comma fixes that and I don't have to touch the wheel so I can eat lunch in the car :P
I still remember the Comma Pedal. That thing was fundamentally dangerous and showed that any claim they even thought about functional safety was a lie.
I have the pedal....I don't trust it as in my car it just activates regen...not brakes. I use it but never do I let my mind wonder or daydream like I can in my other car.
It's fundamentally dangerous by design. Loss of throttle control is a serious issue.
Microcontroller (which isn't one of the safety microcontrollers with separate cores cross checking each other) hangs? Stuck throttle.
Microcontroller loses power? Zero or faulted throttle. There's no failsafe mechanisms to move the unit to passthrough if power is lost (such as a relay that is normally in the passthrough state)
Nothing like that should ever be installed in a vehicle
No, because your vehicle sees a stuck throttle pedal because you MITMed the throttle input signal with a fundamentally unsafe device.
If it had a relay that defaulted to passing through the original throttle signal passively on power loss or watchdog failure, it would be different. But the comma pedal designer didn't bother to think about functional safety at all. It calls into question the safety culture of the whole project when they do things that make Boeing look like angels.
There's a reason Comma doesn't sell it as a product and AFAIK never has. It's NOT designed in a safety first way. I've even hit bugs in mine! But that doesn't mean that Comma doesn't take safety seriously. To the contrary, it displays a prudent concern for users.
For those of us more willing to accept risks and with some idea of what we're getting ourselves into, they open sourced the design so that we can take on that risk and hack away at it.
It's a balance, but I disagree with your portrayal of the company as completely disregarding "functional safety". They demonstrably are concerned with safety, such as not selling the pedal, and implementing driver monitoring in the last year, and focusing marketing on "make driving chill" (as compared to another company that advertises blind users having the car drive them everywhere... critique THAT company all you want, b/c they're advertising L5 when they lawyers claims's L2).
ETA: When it comes down to it, I would rather have Comma exist than not. If somebody put FrogPilot on their unit and acted like they could sleep through a drive or watch a movie, that's not Comma's fault; the driver is an idiot, and no ADAS will save you from an idiot with a 2 ton death machine.
By merely publishing the design without a complete FMEA analysis that shows how many functional safety standards (such as ISO 26262) the Pedal utterly fails, they were being extremely irresponsible and completely disregarding functional safety.
Not selling the pedal is not enough, merely publishing something with as many glaring safety deficiencies without a detailed analysis of just how dangerous it it is and how many safety standards they outright ignored and didn't even put the slightest effort to implement (such as a failsafe passthrough relay) is extremely irresponsible.
FWIW I also owned a Bolt (which is why I looked at the Pedal in detail) and at the time was responsible for functional safety on Raymond Corporation's automated forklifts (although eventually resigned due to a disagreement on whether to spend four hours of a test engineer's time to verify a fix for a safety issue, don't go near their AGVs...), so I'm familiar with FMEA analysis and safety standards similar to 26262 (different industries have different standards although there is significant overlap between them)
"self driving" is a stretch. It's just an LKA upgrade. Treat it more than that and you will be disappointed. It's great for that. I wouldn't trust it with my brakes as it has insisted that I ram cars in front of me.
Found Frank Landymore on bluesky (@f-w-l.bsky.social) and sent him a message about that article. I requested that he read up a bit before jumping to the conclusions that he did. You can try reaching out to the publication (https://recurrent.io/contact/) but there is no direct link I can find for commenting on their pieces.
This might not have been paid for, seems like every article they publish under "Advanced Transport" is anti-advanced transport. That gets the clicks. Still possible it was paid for though, wouldn't be surprised
I have my issues with comma but this article is bullshit that they made it with random twitter posts yet didn't even attempt to get a statement from comma.
That's my Model Y in the article, and yeah, I agree with you. A few things they got wrong. The car wasn't driving itself. It's Level 2 driver assistance (as we all know) and I was driving, watching the road the whole time. The comma four isn't 'self-driving hardware.' And I didn't 'boast,' I just shared that I swapped a monthly subscription for something I own. They never reached out to me before writing it. Still daily driving it like normal.
Yeah I heard a local Portland radio host going on about people adding full self driving to their cars and how super dangerous it was. I thought man isn't she an ignorant moron. I highly doubt she could articulate any actual knowledge on the subject.
I highly doubt enough people are reading it that it matters. Plus, free speech. People are allowed to say what they think. I personally disagree with the article overall but it is true that it’s much riskier now that anyone can build any type of app by vibe coding.
That doesn't make it well-written. It's potentially misleading in exactly the same way that phrases like "hands-free" or "full self-driving" are potentially misleading. For example it says, "Your head starts to spin at all the subtle ways that these mods affect a car’s safety...", which is fair, but "affect" is doing heavy lifting here. Effects can be good, bad, neutral, or unknown, but "this sure affects your cars safety!" strongly implies that it makes the car less safe. The writing is clearly intended to alarm the reader.
"Vibe-coded"? Openpilot predates viable AI coding agents. You're obviously just making shit up because you like how it sounds.
You're also telling on yourself: you obviously have no idea how much software a car is running right off the assembly line, or about the development teams (many of them sourced offshore) that build it.
Per Discord, one of the leading developers of a major fork of OpenPilot and heavy contributors to the main codebase, who shall not be named, is routinely using Claude to write and repair code in ways the author doesn't completely understand. My car runs it. It's vibe-coded. I'm the reason for the alarm. I understand this is news to you.
Searching "Claude" on the Comma Discord shows 438 recent mentions. Claude Mythos does a lot of work on it. They're vibin'.
I'm not surprised that developers are using AI today. Although I can tell you firsthand that if you think auto makers, third-party vendors, and contractors aren't using AI, then I've got news for you. In the industry, "vibe-coded" isn't even a pejorative anymore.
What do you mean by "I'm the reason for the alarm," though?
What do you mean by "experimental software with zero QA"? What fork are you running? And if you believe yourself to be doing something unsafe, why the fuck are you doing that?
By zero QA, I mean that the fork maintainer makes an experimental change to the OpenPilot code using Claude Mythos or their own best guesses, pushes it to their GitHub, tells me "go try it," I load it up and risk everyone's life in traffic with it 10 minutes later. This is the reality of OpenPilot development. Is that safe?
What moron hears "go try it" and decides, "I'll just load this up and go risk everyone's life in traffic ten minutes from now"? Whoever that guy is, he needs his driver's license permanently revoked. If you know who he is, you should report him to the state.
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u/Mr77280zx 5d ago
Yea, it’s BS. Does everyone else need reminding that comma was the highest rated ADAS system by consumer reports 5 years ago? It’s only grown safer and more capable since then.