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George Hotz wants to remake everything from your car to your phone, cheaper and faster than Google or Tesla.
"Self-driving cars are going to be the effort of a lot more than one small startup," George Hotz says. "Download our stuff, build it into your cars, don't give me anything."
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 driverless-car problem and why he believes "we're living in the best time ever" even if privacy is a thing of the past.
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