[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/selfdriving-safety/comma-ai-...
It is not just your own risk but also that of other pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers that share the road with you.
"At your own risk" means you bear the risk (legally). If something happens, it is on you, and the manufacturer offloads any liability on you.
That does not imply what the risks are. Life threatening? You are risking other people's lives.
While a reasonable interpretation includes putting the driver at increased /legal/ risk relative to a system where the manufacturer represents it as for sale for autonomous driving, it is unreasonable to infer that this puts the driver at greater risk of being sued, having to sue, or monetary loss. OpenPilot may be better / safer than the competition such that using it lowers your risk of accident, monetary loss, etc. even including any purported loss of the ability to pass the buck to the manufacturer.
> openpilot is developed in good faith to be compliant with FMVSS requirements and to follow industry standards of safety for Level 2 Driver Assistance Systems. In particular, we observe ISO26262 guidelines, including those from pertinent documents released by NHTSA. In addition, we impose strict coding guidelines (like MISRA C : 2012) on parts of openpilot that are safety relevant. We also perform software-in-the-loop, hardware-in-the-loop and in-vehicle tests before each software release. [0]
I would be quite curious to see how they perform HIL tests and in-vehicle tests and if those results are also public?
[0] https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/master/SAFETY.md
Edit: I cannot edit or remove the grandparent comment but I leave here this correction
And of course that uC unit comes in a 3D printed enclosure so yeah
ISO26262 compliance is really heavy and requires enormous amount of documentation and requirements tracking.
Some sources mention it is for research only purposes (in closed roads?), others advertise this as a CES consumer product, has the project evolved along the way?
Each car manufacturer has to provide a battery of tests to regulators for each vehicle and sub-system within each vehicle. This project claims to be safe to use on more than 100 separate vehicles, perhaps I am missing something but this claim would require a considerable amount of evidence.
I am all for open-source and experimentation but in cases where we cannot provide guarantees, this should be done on a private road at your own risk.