iPhone jailbreaker George Hotz stops with self-driving car kit

George Hotz, better known as the hacker Geohot, has announced that he will stop developing the Comma One. This is a kit with which users can make a normal car partly self-driving. The reason for the decision is a letter from the government.

In the letter, the Nhtsa road safety committee writes that it has recently heard of Hotz’s plans. In the letter, the committee refers to a recent blog post by comma.ai, the company Hotz founded to develop the technology. In it he writes that it is not the intention of the system to make a car self-driving, but that it concerns a combination of lane guidance and adaptive cruise control. Therefore, its use should be legal, Hotz claims. The Nhtsa takes a different view and asks that Hotz postpone the delivery of the Comma One to check whether the system is actually safe.

In addition, the committee asks whether Hotz is willing to answer fifteen questions about his product before 10 November in the context of a ‘special order’. If he does not do this, he will face a penalty of USD 21,000 per day, converted approximately EUR 19,200. The questions concern, for example, the installation of the system, its functionality, the conditions for safe use and which brakes the system supports.

In response to the letter, Hotz wrote a series of tweets know that he will stop with the Comma One and that his company will focus on other products. He does not report which products these are. He adds that he would rather spend his life building great technology than dealing with regulators and lawyers. He is critical of the Nhtsa because the organization first approached him through the letter and did not ask to test the system.

In April, Hotz had raised another $3.1 million investment from the development of the system. He planned to release the Comma One before the end of this year for a price of $999 along with a monthly fee of $24 for the software. Hotz is known under the name Geohot, among other things, for the fact that at the age of seventeen he developed a jailbreak for the iPhone and later PlayStation 3 exploit.

Hotz with Comma One, image through comma.ai