Gadgetory

there are a lot of companies investing in autonomous driving but there's one outfit out of San Francisco that's taking a different approach Calma dot a I founded by George Hotz is building kits that allow drivers to change their cars for less than $1000 into autonomous vehicles so we decided to come to Las Vegas to see how close hots was to reaching his goal driving is a surprisingly intuitive process you might not think this if you look and you you know you go to the DMV and you read the book about exactly how many feet you need to stay behind a school bus nobody drives like that people will cross lane lines all the time people cross double yellows all the time right driving is this intuitive fluid thing and to really be able to drive well you need to predict what everybody around you is doing we are common AI and our slogan is ghost riding for the masses we have a very data-driven approach we believe in gathering large amounts of data on the driving problem and learning how to drive from that data instead of sitting in a room with a bunch of engineers talking about how driving works and building what we think is a good driver we actually look get data from good drivers are even bad drivers so we learn what not to do put that into our machine learning algorithms and what we get is a driving agent what's the Beast it drives like a human our goal and our approach is to drive really just by watching people drive to learn every part of the system we are in a 2016 Acura ILX we are self driving alright so hands are off the wheel Camas glowing um if I were to step on either pedal you would hear that disengagement chime there's no trickery with my feet and it's difficult to like bring them up here but I swear I'm doing nothing there are two absolute minimum requirements that we need one is electronic power steering most new cars today shipping have this so if we have electronic power steering the steering wheel is electronically actuated we also need a way to electronically actuate the gas on the brakes now in every fuel-injected car there's some way to do the gas brakes I don't think there's a single car that's break by wire but because of these systems like electronic stability control and adaptive cruise control there are electronic ways to hit the brakes if your car has electronic stability control and electronic power steering there's a chance we can make it work in the center where Stanga cycles okay there's a little bit of side to side well there's a little bit of wind honestly you can actually see the steering wheel it kind of moves a little bit please dad yeah for the most part we're doing pretty good here it will be after market and user installable about on par with setting up a piece of Ikea furniture I'm not all cars will obviously be supported only certain ones at launch we hope to expand that selection spending the day with george hotz in the comedy i car was pretty cool it definitely still has its kinks but for the most part delivers on its promises and if george hotz can deliver that product but end of the year for less than a thousand dollars will be well on our way to driverless cars