iPhone jailbreaker of the first hour builds self-driving car

George Hotz, better known as Geohot, is building an autonomous car. He does this with cheap, commercially available equipment and self-invented software running on an Ubuntu machine.

Hotz was the first to unlock an iPhone in 2007 as a 17-year-old, making the phone usable on networks other than AT&T. Later, he was the first to get deeper into the PlayStation 3. Now he hopes to be the first to beat Israeli company Mobileye with his own artificial intelligence software. Mobileye is a supplier of technology for driver assist in cars from Tesla, BMW, Ford and General Motors, among others. He seems to be reasonably convinced of his abilities, according to an extensive interview that Hotz gave to Bloomberg Business. In the accompanying video of more than six minutes, Hotz shows little appreciation for the current state of the art. He has good reason to do so: he started developing his system in October.

Hotz indicates that he wants to beat Mobileye’s technology with simple, readily available electronics and with his own system of artificial intelligence. He thinks his system will be ready for about a thousand dollars. Then the system consists of six cameras that can also be found in mobile phones. Two near the rearview mirror, one behind, two on the sides to overlook the blind spot and a fisheye camera on top. Also, his system does not use programmers’ pre-programmed ideas about how a car should drive. Everything the system knows, it has learned from ‘riding’ with Hotz in his Acura ILX.

He managed to achieve this system by selling himself as an employee to a Honda garage, in order to be able to download the schematics and manuals of the car. Not much later, he outfitted his own car with an Intel NUC, a few GPS units and a joystick to operate it. He connected the whole thing to the car’s on-board computer and stuck a lidar on the roof.

Soon he wants to beat a Tesla Model S on Interstate 405 to prove that his technology is better than Tesla’s. If he succeeds, he will also win a bet he has with Elon Musk, who already offered him several million to join Tesla, something that Holz declined. He is reported to have said that he found Musk’s offer friendly, but that he is not looking for a job.

Interview George Hotz by Bloomberg