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How a College Kid Made His Honda Civic Self-Driving for $700

2019.01.16|
Tech Trends

Jorgenson set about ordering the parts needed to build up Comma’s device, the Neo, the same day Hotz dumped the plans online. He had been following Comma’s fortunes, and he happened to own a 2016 Honda Civic, one of the two models supported by the company’s software (the other is the 2016 Acura ILX).

A Neo is built from a OnePlus 3 smartphone equipped with Comma’s now-free Openpilot software, a circuit board that connects the device to the car’s electronics, and a 3-D-printed case. Jorgenson got the case printed by an online service and soldered the board together himself.

He first put his life in the device’s hands in late January after an evening college class. “It was dark on the interstate, and I tested it by myself because I figured if anything went wrong I didn’t want anybody else in the car,” says Jorgenson. “It worked phenomenally.” Subsequent tests revealed that the Neo would inexplicably pull to the right sometimes, but a software update released by Comma quickly fixed that. Now fully working, the system is similar in capabilities to the initial version of Tesla’s AutoPilot (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies: Tesla AutoPilot”).

Comma’s plans and software aren’t the only resources out there for wanna-be self-driving-car builders. Neodriven, a startup based in Los Angeles, recently started selling a pre-built Neo device that works with Comma’s Openpilot; it costs $1,495. Online-education platform Udacity has released code used in its autonomous-car research program, and students in one of its courses are actively improving and expanding it (“The Creator of Google’s Self-Driving Car Now Competes with It”).

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