George "Geohot" Hotz launched his self-driving car startup, Comma.ai, a year ago out of his garage at the “Crypto Castle” in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood. A year later, he said he's ready to start shipping.
At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Hotz announced a self-driving car kit, called Comma One, that he promises will start shipping before the end of the year.
The rectangular, green-colored device will replace the rear-view mirror and will be self installable, Hotz said. While he didn't share any of the hardware specs at the conference, Hotz said the kit would contain its own camera and hold all the machine learning algorithms to help the car drive itself.
The kit will only work on certain Honda and Acura cars with lane-keeping assistance features. Comma One will take advantage of the radars and cameras built into those vehicles.
Hotz said it will cost $999 for the hardware and another $24 a month for a subscription to the software.
Hotz promises the device could get a driver "from Mountain View to San Francisco without touching anything." That's a more than 50 mile trip on an extremely busy stretch of highway. This isn't fully autonomous driving, but more like "really fancy cruise control." Hotz said it would be on par with Tesla's Autopilot feature.
Hotz said release will be limited to the Bay Area at first. "These will be harder to come by than a pair of Kanye West sneakers," Hotz quipped on stage.
Never one to pass the chance to mock his competitors, Hotz poked fun at
He said that despite his public spat with Elon Musk he has a lot of respect for Tesla, because it's actually shipping a self-driving car. The first fatality in a Tesla car with Autopilot mode on doesn't bother Hotz. "40,000 people die a year from not paying attention," he said. "It was a driver not paying attention. That happens left and right on the road today. ...Think about all the lives that Autopilot could save." (Hotz said drivers will still need to pay close attention even with the Comma One system.)
"If [Tesla] is the iOS of self-driving cars, we want to be the Android," said Hotz.
A hacker best known for being the first person to jailbreak the iPhone and later the PlayStation 3, Hotz started Comma.ai last year and began by taking apart an Acura ILX to create his own self-driving car. When I took a look, the car had six cameras, radar and Lidar. The machine learning algorithms that ran on a computer with an Nvidia graphics card that sat in the car’s trunk.
(Read more: How George Hotz Plans To Beat Tesla And Google With His Robocar Startup)
Since then, Hotz has raised $3.1 million from Andreessen Horowitz and launched iPhone and Android dash cam apps designed to start collecting data to train his self-driving algorithms. At the TechCrunch conference, Hotz said there are currently 730 active drivers collecting data.
Watch an interview with George Hotz and his self-driving car demo:
