from Hacker News

How a College Kid Made His Honda Civic Self-Driving for $700

by nichodges on 2/21/17, 6:14 AM with 6 comments

  • by CaliforniaKarl on 2/21/17, 7:27 AM

    Every time I hear about stuff like this, I'm reminded of the words of Jeremy Clarkson:

    "It's a brilliant idea, designed by very smart people, but one day you know that this will be bought by a man named Keith, and he is going to wake up one morning and think he can service it himself. And you won’t be able to relax in your autonomobile [sic] because you know that Keith is in his, coming the other way."

    I really hope that humanity will be able to advance fast enough, to keep up with the advances in self-driving and assisted-driving vehicles.

  • by potato122 on 2/21/17, 9:05 AM

    Who needs a Tesla when you can build your own automated copilot using free hardware designs and software available online?

    These days you can 3d print a .45, but would you really wrap your hand around that thing and squeeze the trigger?

    This is a car...

  • by kbouck on 2/21/17, 7:41 AM

    > “I am less interested in full autonomy and more in preventing rear-endings,” he says. “A lot of existing cars can be retrofitted.”

    Would love it if my elderly parents could enjoy such automation to assist in avoiding minor accidents, while preserving their autonomy. They won't likely be buying any new cars at this point. But retrofitting their existing cars with some bump and crash avoidance functionality would be great.

  • by willhallonline on 2/21/17, 10:17 PM

    I guess my main concern is that I, daily, see that a lot of software is just about working when it is shipped. I would love to be able to program my car, but I do wonder about the people who are running the hypothetical dev version which still pulls to the right. Or just download something from Github and run it.

  • by throwaway2016a on 2/21/17, 2:11 PM

    I think in these articles it is important to list what level of self-driving car this is. From the article it sounds like a 1 or a 2.

    One thing articles like this do bring up is that we may be able to retrofit a lot of existing cars which could shorten the adoption delay caused by people keeping their cars 10+ years.