Open Source Self-Driving with Comma AI

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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**Daniel Whitenack** (0:41)
Welcome to another episode of the Practical AI podcast. This is Daniel Whitenack. I'm CEO at Prediction Guard, and I'm joined as always by my co-host, Chris Benson, who is a principal AI and autonomy research engineer. How are you doing, Chris?

**Chris Benson** (0:57)
I'm doing very well today. How's it going?

**Daniel Whitenack** (0:59)
It's going great. I was commenting to our guests today, just before we started recording that earlier this year, I was in the car with one of our engineers, shout out to Ed, and he's like, hey, have you heard about this cool thing? We're driving in the car, right? He's like, hey, there's this cool thing you can put in the car and make it like an AI-assisted driving car without it being like a specific self-driving car.
So he forwarded me the information about Comma, and I'm really excited today to welcome Harald Schäfer, who is CTO at Comma AI. Welcome, Harald.

**Harald Schäfer** (1:43)
Thank you. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here. Yeah.

**Daniel Whitenack** (1:46)
Well, obviously, I alluded to some of what you're involved with, but maybe could you give us just a little bit of background about yourself and Comma and kind of how you ended up in this spot of working on some of the things that you're working on?

**Harald Schäfer** (2:04)
Sure. So Comma makes this device, like you said, that you can install in cars and gives them autonomy features that they hadn't had before, things like auto steer and better ACC. So on the highway, you kind of get some level of autonomy.
And the software that runs that is OpenPilot, and that's a completely open source autonomy stack for cars.
By far the most popular open source self-driving stack online. And I think it's currently even the most popular robotics project on GitHub. So that's kind of where we're at. I've been working on this a really long time. I've been at Comma for nine years now. So basically, been my entire life. I don't think there's much to say about my professional life. That's not related to Comma. But I came to the US like 10 years ago, graduated and started working here. And so I've been working on OpenPilot and this type of stuff ever since.

**Daniel Whitenack** (3:03)
So what was, when you started that journey, what was kind of the state of both like self-driving autonomy? When you started things and also like I guess on the commercial and closed source side and the open source side, what did that look like kind of then compared to now if you look back on that journey?

**Harald Schäfer** (3:26)
So when I joined, we didn't have a product. It was just a project and you could kind of install the software if you went through the hassle of installing like a beefy laptop in your car and installing all the power. Or you could like retrofit a phone that you'd have to do all that yourself. So that was the state the project was in when I joined. The company was pretty young at that time.
George, the founder, had I think worked on it for a little over a year, maybe two years at the time. And that's the state it was in. It was a usable ADAS system, but the product side was really not that in a great estate. So that's where we were. In terms of open source, I think there is no real, genuine open source ADAS product that's useful in any way. Other than us, that was true then, that's true now. But the commercial side has obviously changed massively in that time. 2017, when I joined, highway autonomy was bad, maybe usable in some cases, but most people probably wouldn't use it because it just makes too many mistakes, it's too uncomfortable. That's obviously not true at all anymore.
OpenPilot is really good. We have over 50% of miles driven with people that have our system, are driven by the system and not the human. Obviously, there's Tesla FSD, which is at an even higher level of what kind of things it can do, and you can get over 90% engagement there if you really wanted to. You've got Waymo, which is like supervised robot taxi, that's like an actual product.