Confidence is not something I would assign to his product. Or any product that is a camera-only lane-follower.
That Holtz caves at the slightest thought of a regulator looking at his work easily shows how immature he is as an engineer.
Doesn't surprise me, after reading http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driv...: "Instead of the hundreds of thousands of lines of code found in other self-driving vehicles, Hotz’s software is based on about 2,000 lines."
In general I like the approach of using deep-learning instead of complex hardcoded rules (see the article above for more details), but even with deep-learning you're going to need a complex ruleset in order to deal with the edge-cases.
Getting a prototype of a self-driving car working is probably much less than 5% of the overall amount of work that's required. Getting the car respond correctly to the long tail of edge cases is the other 95% of the work.
There's a long road from a working prototype to a shipping product.
And perhaps there are better uses of their time, and better regulatory environments where they can release their product.
Maybe in a couple months we are going to hear about the imminent release of the Comma Two in Not-America. I seriously doubt they've gone home. There are tons of places where they could starting selling right NOW.
America's loss, other countries' gain.
No, what you need is to have followed a sufficient quality process to begin with. Lawyers aren't involved heavily in this sort of thing; your quality group is (well, it may take more lawyering for them at this point.)
This guy obviously didn't have a clue when he set out to build this thing and now his ignorance is biting him in the ass. I've worked on FDA regulated devices my entire career. You don't get to just throw things that represent a substantial safety risk onto the market without oversight, and that's a good thing.
Then I'm very thankful for the NHTSA we have in America. I don't want a bunch of half-ass, poorly-engineered self-driving cars on our roads. I use those roads, and so do my family members.
While I'm looking forward to self-driving cars taking over, I don't want the Comma One in the field if they can't handle the most basic safety inquiries.
You can't just walk in being an arrogant, know-it-all whiz kid and demand that the rules be bent and mere mortals be forced to step aside in deference to your superior intellect.
It doesn't matter if most people reject your idea, you only need a couple cities to say "approved for preliminary testing for a limited number/couple thousand beta testers" to go into Prod. And then when you go into prod you get real life data and can prove that your product really is as awesome as you say it is, THEN you go back to the countries that said no, but this time with more money and actual facts to back you up.
This isn't some super expensive product that is out of reach for the world. This is a thousand dollar conversion kit. If these things were available and I owned a Honda, I would have bought it to just mess around with it instead of buying the HTC Vive that I got last night.
I am sure there are lots of beta customers around the world who would be interested in getting a prelim beta version.
That sounds like you think that other countries would allow "a bunch of half-ass, poorly-engineered self-driving cars on our roads"?
As an EU citizen, I can assure you that this is widely off the mark.
I don't believe it's the case that Hotz needed to incur six figure legal bills to respond to NHTSA's initial order. He probably could have responded to NHTSA personally, without counsel, and game-theoretically not damaged his potential outcomes at all. He had the option to find out, and threw it away.