26-year-old single-handedly builds semi-autonomous car to rival Tesla’s
A San Francisco-based hacker has built his own car with self-driving capabilities that rival a Tesla’s, which have the most advanced systems on the market. And he recently took a Bloomberg Business reporter along for a test drive.
George Hotz made a series of adjustments to a 2016 Acura ILX , including attaching cameras and a roof-mounted laser-based radar (or lidar) system.
Hotz also installed a 21.5-inch digital screen in the center console that puts Tesla’s 17-inch touchscreen console to shame.
In 2007, Hotz became famous under his online alias “geohot’’ when he figured out how to hack Apple’s iPhone, allowing it to use other networks besides AT&T.
According to Bloomberg Business, Hotz’s self-driving apparatus is similar to Tesla’s self-driving autopilot feature and works best on a highway setting. Hotz took the Bloomberg Business reporter on a test drive on I-280 in San Francisco.
From Bloomberg Business:
“With Hotz still holding the wheel, the Acura’s lidar paints a pixelated image on the dash screen of everything around us, including the freeway walls and other cars. A blue line charts the path the car is taking, and a green line shows the path the self-driving software recommends. The two match up pretty well, which means the technology is working. After a couple miles, Hotz lets go of the wheel and pulls the trigger on the joystick, kicking the car into self-driving mode. He does this as we head into an S curve at 65 miles per hour. I say a silent prayer. Hotz shouts, ‘You got this, car! You got this!’’’
Hotz apparently plans to release a YouTube video in a few months to show his design going toe-to-toe with a Tesla Model S on a highway.
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But Tesla CEO and founder Elon Musk expressed his doubts about Hotz’s efforts.
Musk said in a blog post, “We think it is extremely unlikely that a single person or even a small company that lacks extensive engineering validation capability will be able to produce an autonomous driving system that can be deployed to production vehicles.
“It may work as a limited demo on a known stretch of road … but then requires enormous resources to debug over millions of miles of widely differing roads.’’
You can read the full Bloomberg Business profile here.
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