The software that powers self-driving cars is no longer the domain of proprietary systems built by billion-dollar companies.
Open source assisted driving systems like Comma AI’s Openpilot have made it possible for anyone tech savvy enough to turn their set of wheels into a self-driving experiment. If you have $1,000 to spare and possess a willingness to serve as a lab rat in pursuit of automotive automation, you can buy a kit from Comma to retrofit your grocery getter with autonomous-driving ready sensors and cameras.
With all the attention that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system and Waymo’s robotaxis get, these DIY options have largely flown under the radar. We may have recently gotten a taste, however, of what the reaction to this aftermarket tech going mainstream might look like.
Over the weekend, a man going by Mike LaBarbera on X posted a video of his Tesla Model Y driving itself using Comma Four, the latest version of Comma AI’s self-driving hardware.
“My FSD subscription ended last January, and this isn’t Tesla Autopilot,” LaBarbera said. With this open source alternative, he boasted, he was “no longer renting a closed system.”
Actually, LaBarbera clarified, what was running the car in the video is “Sunnypilot,” an Openpilot fork — someone else’s custom version of the software, essentially.
While a compelling testament to how far self-driving tech has come along, the video has also alarmed some observers with how easy it apparently is to install custom tech to control your car.
“I do not think we should be letting people run any software they want on their self-driving car,” said Cairo Smith, a writer, in a post that attracted more likes than the original. “It is not Skyrim for Linux. You do not get mods on the freeway.”
Interestingly, some of the most scathing critiques came from apparent proponents of mainstream self-driving efforts. One viral hot take fumed at the possibility of getting into a fatal accident because of choosing to drive “an opensource repo with 3,000 stars instead of just buying the actually good system” on a car that was originally built to support self-driving, like a Tesla.
Another called it a “joke.”
“Imagine getting home with your family, and this guy crashes into you because of some vibe coded PR in a GitHub repo with 2k stars,” the user wrote.
The software has also gotten the attention of federal regulators. Last week, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration opened an investigation into Comma AI after five crashes involving cars that were running Openpilot. In each of the crashes, the vehicles slammed into slow-moving or stopped vehicles in their lanes. Eleven people have been injured across these incidents, and three have died.
Per Electrek’s coverage, the investigation covers 30,000 Comma hardware kits, including Comma Four. One area that the agency is zeroing in on is Comma AI’s marketing, which promises “hands free driving for the car you already have,” despite its fine print stating the cars require constant supervision.
It’s a problem that becomes yet more thorny when you consider that many Comma users may not be using it out of the box, but installing modded versions of the software. Your head starts to spin at all the subtle ways that these mods affect a car’s safety, all without the ostensible accountability you get from a system being built at a large, commercial entity like Tesla.
And that’s without getting into how the rise of vibe coding means that it’s also not a remote possibility that someone inexperienced will use an AI model to customize Openpilot to their liking. Barring major regulatory intervention, we may have to get used to sharing more of the road with people’s homemade robot chauffeurs.
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