He has announced the release of the product, was taking orders for it and said it was going to be shipping by the end of the year [1]

The timeframe here is driven by Hotz who apparently has not had any communication with the relevant regulatory agencies. Any attorney he hires would tell him "Okay lets push back the release to mid next year while we work with the NHTSA on resolving their concerns" and the NHTSA would probably be perfectly fine with working with him.

"Move fast and break shit" doesn't count when you're putting lives at risk.

lots of reminders that they can and will close down his business if they feel like it - yes and they should.

[1] https://electrek.co/2016/09/14/comma-ai-claims-to-have-packa...

You can't just wire up an Arduino to the CAN bus of a 4,000-pound missile and sell it on the open market willy-nilly.

best self-driving comment ever.

Which either he should have readily available, since he's the creator, or he should have known, since he should be able to demonstrate the safety of the device.

> I assume under threat of legal consequences if any of it contains an error

Usually you hand over what you have, then you negotiate with the regulator for a time frame to answer the more difficult questions. If you're unsure about something, tell the regulator up front.

The correct response is not to throw a tantrum and shut everything down.

> interspersed with lots of reminders that they can and will close down his business if they feel like it

That's the textbook definition of 'regulation'.

I think the correct response is to work with them 110%. Having that government body happy with you isn't a bad thing - you could become the reference spec for self-driving if you please them to an appropriate degree.

> That's the textbook definition of 'regulation'.

Right, and it's one of the big problems I have with this form of regulation.

I think it violates the idea of "Rule of Law", as opposed to "Rule of Man", which was one of the major factors behind the rise of modern free society.

The empirical experience is that regulatory agencies over time gravitate towards favoring the big established players in the industry they're regulating.

The economist term is "Regulatory Capture".

Giving some people a lot of discretionary power of others does worry me a lot. It might well be unavoidable sometimes, but it's really naive to not see the potential for abuse.

The calculation needs to be "if this agency is run by the usual corruptible and imperfect people like you and me, will it be a net gain for society?", rather than the "assume a selfless set of civic minded experts..." mindset I think a lot of people have.

As long it's humans that write and execute laws, this is strictly unavoidable. It doesn't depend on the particular details of how we do regulation.

Set 1 (legislators) can and do write laws to favor and disfavor individual actors, and I agree that that is in part unavoidable.

Set 2 (judges and juries) are appointed randomly after it's become a legal matter, so it's impossible for any inappropriate influence in either direction before that.

And there is no "set 3" of regulators that issue orders during the day-to-day running of the business.

So I think you're right that this problem always exist, but in my estimation it's a few orders of magnitude bigger under a "Rule of Man" regulation scheme.

You mentioned 2 branches of government, the legislative and judicial. But the third branch, the executive, does (in part) exactly what you described above.

Taken to the logical extreme, your view means we should replace every government adminstrator with a court, including for mundane decisions like whether to grant a marriage license. That system would be horribly inefficient and probably not much more consistent or effective since random people off the street won't have the domain knowledge a regulator has.

Also, regulators are representatives of the people and are subject to laws just like everyone else. The escape hatch of the legal system is always available -- if you think the regulator got it wrong, then take it to a court, and a judge and jury decides who is right.

I mean, how do even mundane things like zoning codes and work permits work in this universe where there are no regulators and gov't bureaucrats? Everything must go through a court? Why are you so sure a group of 12 random people will come to decisions more effectively than a bureaucrat in a domain that requires specialized knowledge?

In any case, I fully agree that sometimes regulators, or regulations are bad. But this particular case is an example of regulation working as designed. The NHTSA has been at the forefront of working with the self-driving car industry to make sure there is a legal path to developing, testing, and releasing this tech. Textbook example of regulators doing their job without imposing undue burdens on the regulated industry.

I talked about regulators. You added bureaucrats on your own.

Perhaps NHTSA is a great organization. I know nothing about them specifically. I'm talking about general principles.

> Why are you so sure a group of 12 random people will come to decisions more effectively than a bureaucrat in a domain that requires specialized knowledge?

I'm saying they'll be more impartial. Don't know about effective.

One of the common ways this works is that the regulator keeps adding more and more complex regulations.

It's counterintuitive that a major company welcomes or instigates added regulations that will cost $20M/year to comply with. But since that makes it more expensive to start competing companies, they can make a lot more money from their increasingly secure oligopoly position.

Hmm. Regulatory capture? Yeah. That.

Seriously, with agencies like the FAA, FCC, EPA, FDA, NHTSA, etc. you can just call them up and you will be connected to a regulator who can help you with every step of getting your product past regulatory requirements. The Small Business Administration also has a lot of people dedicated to helping entrepreneurs with regulatory oversight.

And when a big govt stick comes a'knocking, unless you're also big and well connected, you will get shut down.

This was clear as a way to "do insane amount of documentation in a laughably short timeframe, or fuck your business with a fine-stick."

Yeah, GeoHotz is an ass, but this is inane. Great way to kill small businesses.

He's publicly stated they were aiming for year-end release.

I would understand filing that documentation prior to selling. But I'm also familiar with using "Filing with govt" as a tool of oppression that large companies try to pass as a barrier of market entry. Lawyers are rather expensive, and requiring more volumnous paperwork requires more lawyers.

And speaking of that, what is the repercussions of what you send to NHTSA? Say he sends something inaccurate or glosses over details. What is the liability of sending something wrong to govt? Hmm...

Yes. Wait till he's selling them. And when there's a claim, act on it. Not before.

We as a democratic society decided awhile ago that the benefit of knowing a car product was probably safe outweighs the frictional burden of testing them before they can be sold.

There's a lot of insinuation here that the regulator is actively trying to kill his product, but no evidence. This seems like a run-of-the-mill request, one that the NHTSA probably sends out thousands of times a year to various automakers and auto parts suppliers.

As a counterpoint, I'm sure Tesla has gotten these letters as well, but the NHTSA didn't prevent them from putting AutoPilot on the market.

> what is the repercussions of what you send to NHTSA? Say he sends something inaccurate or glosses over details.

The letter specifically says that estimates are ok. There's nothing wrong with telling the regulator 'We're not sure yet, give us a month to figure it out please?'.

I remember the tactics used to kill most butcheries and local meat shops. Same games, with onerous and idiotic requirements of "compliance" that the big guys can do. Of course, the big companies got legislation to enforce their standing.

This is not opening a dialogue, this is a shakedown to kill a product.

Yes, regulatory capture exists, and incumbents often benefit from it. But I'm having trouble seeing how this particular case is a 'shake down' -- the NHTSA is simply asking him to follow the law, which he should be doing anyway.

[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/03/01/2016-04...

Here's a nicely readable transcript of what they wanted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12817061

None of them sound particularly difficult to answer. Maybe they are difficult to answer in sufficient detail to satisfy the NHTSA, but you can always start out by answering them as best you can, and then seeing if they want more. There are people on the other end of this letter, not some unthinking machine. Toss off a quick response and say, "If you have any other questions or need further detail on the answers given here, please feel free to contact me at any time."

I think you have pretty much already assigned a negative agenda to NHTSA, when they've just requested some info.

While they may have followups if they don't like the answers they get, of all the agencies you find, NHTSA is not one that tends to have a serious pre-bias towards anyone.

I mean yeah, it sucks that the government is so darn picky about things, but that's not an excuse to just skip the process. They should have hired someone like you from the start to ensure that their ducks were in a row when they were ready to release.

There's only one question which could be considered too broad, which is compliance with safety standards, but it's generously worded as a yes or no question. He could simply answer "no, I haven't analyzed my product against against the safety standards".