This Hacker Is Making a Driverless Car in His Garage: George Hotz wants to remake everything from your car to your phone, cheaper and faster than Google or Tesla.

• Author: Monticello, Justin
• Position: Interview

Known online as "GeoHot," Hotz became one of the world's most famous hackers at age 17, when he broke into an early iPhone and reconfigured it to be compatible with providers other than AT&T. He was also the first to jailbreak the PlayStation 3. Now 28, the technical wunderkind is going up against Tesla founder Elon Musk and the entire auto industry in a race to build the first fully operational autonomous vehicle.

While bigger companies such as Google develop complex systems that rely on expensive light detection and radar (LIDAR) sensor systems, Hotz is trying to bring plug-and-play driverless technology to the masses. Operating with $3.1 million in seed money, his company, Comma.ai, builds products that can hijack modern cars' existing features. The goal: To create a kit that can convert your car to a self-driving model for under $1,000.

Hotz has a history of taking on tech titans--and garnering mixed reactions. After the iPhone jailbreak, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak sent him a letter of congratulations. When he hacked the PS3, Sony filed a lawsuit against him.

Comma.ai is Hotz's attempt to take on the major players in a new way. The 12-person team makes an app called Chffr that turns your smartphone into a dashcam and monitors its GPS and accelerometers. More recently, they launched Panda, an $88 dongle that connects to the car, providing even more granular Fitbit-like data about its operations.

The company then takes all the information collected and uses it to inform OpenPilot, an open-source computer program that is slowly learning how to drive. Hotz insists that within five years, he'll be able to release a software update "and then boom, all these cars are level-four self-driving."

In August, Reason's Justin Monticello sat down with the hacker to discuss his unusual approach to solving the driver-less-car problem and why he believes "we're living in the best time ever" even if privacy is a thing of the past.

Reason: How did you start thinking about self-driving car technology?

George Hotz: All these auto manufacturers are hopelessly clueless when it comes to self-driving. Think about it like this: Ever use a nav system in a car?

Yeah. Google Maps.

Google Maps, but not [the navigation system built into] the car, right?

Right.

You use a phone. You can see some great pictures where people stick the phone holder, the suction cup, right onto the nav screen.

Our cars are released every five years. Phones are released every one. So my question was, How do you build self-driving navigation on a cycle that looks a lot more like the smartphone cycle than the car cycle? A 5-year-old phone is so, so old-looking. It looks a lot like, well, a car navigation system. They're using the chips from 5-year-old phones. It's just the way the car manufacturers think.

So your idea is that you should be able to plug and play your self-driving system into pretty much any car?

It's not going to be any. You need some tailoring to the car. But you take the top 20 cars in America and that's like 50 percent of the cars sold. We want to support most of those, and then don't worry about the long tail.

What led you to start Comma.ai, and what's your vision for the company?

I want to win self-driving cars. The top three cars sold in America are pickup trucks. But of the next seven, six are Hondas and Toyotas. Honda and Toyota aren't going to have self-driving tech anytime soon. These are the cars that I want to support--the cars that Americans are really driving. Toyota Corollas, Honda Civics, RAV4s, CRVs.

How does your system work in contrast to systems like Google's, which use expensive equipment like LIDAR?

We ship a camera, and we use the radar that's built into the car and the sensors that are built into the car. The systems that companies like Google are building, they're not feasible for passenger vehicles. There's no market for a $100,000 quasi-self driving car. It's not even full self-driving. Google's never made a physical product that has shipped.

How about Chromecast?

A $40 TV dongle. Were they the first one to ship a TV dongle? No. Google can only iterate and build on top of what other companies have already done.

Was Chrome the first web browser? No, but it was the best. Was Android the first non-iOS operating system for smart-phones? No, but it was way better than Symbian and the Blackberry OS. Google in some ways is not an innovative company, and when they try to innovate, you get things like Google Glass. Google is the Xerox PARC of the self-driving industry.

And you think your cheaper system will be able to accomplish everything that these other companies are doing with their more expensive LIDAR systems?

Absolutely right. The truth is, even with those LIDAR systems, nobody has the kind of reliability they need to get from level two to level four.

Can you explain what that means?

These are the different levels of self-driving cars. Level two is what ships in cars today. [Tesla's] Autopilot is a level-two system. [My company's] OpenPilot is a level-two system. This means that the human needs to be paying attention, in the loop, and liable at all times. Even if they're not touching the wheel, the gas, or the brake.

Level three means occasionally the human could not pay attention. Level four means the human is never liable. You could practically remove the steering wheel and pedals from the car. But in order for that to be OK, your system better be a good bit better than humans. Not perfect--it's never, ever going to be perfect--but it's got to be better than humans. No system is there yet.

So in this analogy you would be the Steve Jobs going into the Xerox campus, finding the graphical user interface, and seeing that they're messing it up--

I'm a lot more like the Bill Gates. Elon's the Steve Jobs.

You want to be the Bill Gates?

Yeah, I'll be the Bill Gates.

Wow, nobody ever wants to be the Bill Gates.

I'm not an...