Aftermarket Driver Assists, Five Crashes, and a Federal Inquiry
Aftermarket devices that can boost or augment a vehicle's native advanced driver assistance systems are the target of a new federal investigation this week. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Office of Defects Investigation says it knows of five crashes in which drivers using devices from comma.ai crashed into stopped or slow-moving cars.
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Two of those five crashes resulted in three deaths, and 11 people were injured in four of the five, some seriously.
The hardware has a hacker lineage. Comma.ai was the brainchild of George Hotz, who rose to prominence by jailbreaking iOS and hacking Sony PlayStations, and who first modified his own Acura to give it a more advanced driver assist that let him take his hands off the wheel — with the goal of selling the system to Tesla and replacing Mobileye as its supplier.