Comma.ai has been in news every now and then because of the promises it gave us for the future of driverless cars. Founder George Hotz started the company in a bid to prove a point, that existing vehicles and off the shelf components can be used to make driverless vehicles at low cost. Now Comma.ai has made 7.25 hours of driverless highway driving data available openly. This is a particularly interesting move considering the fact that while Google and Tesla have been pretty open about their developments, most of the startups in this space weren’t.

Sharing data with other innovators in this space will help the entire industry collectively move forward. Being open helps in improving machine learning. George Hotz has invited people to use the data to replicate the results and build further with the data. He shared that there were missteps along the way and no one needs to repeat them to learn the same lessons. He has also asked Zoox, Tesla, Google and Cruise to share their data.

Most of the companies working towards autonomous vehicles are looking at urban conditions first, with the exception of Tesla maybe, however the data shared by Comma.ai is for highway driving conditions. It could also be of help to the hobbyists that are working on these technologies as their backyard projects. This would also open up the gates to the company for right kind of people and attract them with the message. You can contribute towards a driverless world by using their chffr app that turns your mobile phone into a cloud based dashboard camera and feeds data to comma.ai to help develop their system.

Source: TechCrunch

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Mobileye, the startup behind autonomous technology in Tesla cars and technologies for dozens of other car makers, is parting ways with Tesla. Mobileye’s EyeQ system is behind most of the semi-autonomous vehicles we see however, recently during a Q2 financial result conference call, Mobileye CTO Amnon Shashua announced that the relationship between Tesla and Mobileye will end. According to him, the work will not extend past the current system-on-a-chip used in Tesla Model S and Model X but the company will continue to support current vehicles including software fixes. It isn’t clear who pulled the plug on this association.

(Image: Tesla Model X by jurvetson/ CC-BY 2.0)

It is likely that Tesla will work on its version of the Autopilot software internally for the future. In a statement shared with Fortune, Elon Musk has shared that Mobileye has to support large number of models from legacy auto companies which was affecting its ability to evolve the technology quickly. Interestingly, a few months back Musk said that Tesla will continue to use Mobileye’s technology in response to the speculations about Tesla looking at Comma.ai for driverless car technology.

On the other side, Mobileye has recently announced a partnership with BMW and Intel to work towards creating a platform that would help various innovators in the space along with automobile companies to contribute towards the future of driverless cars. Surprisingly, the recent incident involving Tesla Model S wasn’t mentioned by Tesla or Mobileye while some are speculating that it could be a reason behind the fallout.

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