George Hotz, a 26-year-old hacker living in San Francisco, believes he has found a way to add self-driving technology to your car for just $1,000. At a time when companies like Mercedes, Tesla and Google are spending millions developing self-driving technology, Hotz believes he has found a way to add self-driving technology to your car for just $1,000.
Using a 2016 Acura ILX as a testing platform, the hacker took about a month to assemble the list of electronics he needed. A 21.5-inch display It consists of a 21.5-inch display in the dashboard, a mini computer running Linux , GPS sensors built into the glove compartment, and cameras mounted around the car.
All of this hardware works with Hotz's custom software to teach it how to drive like a human, and so far, it's working very well.
Unlike other self-driving car platforms, Hotz focuses on “if this happens, do that” rules and feeding the car with information about how people drive so it can continually improve.
Hotz is already well-known in the tech community. He first gained notoriety at the age of 17 as the first hacker to unlock an iPhone and make it work on any mobile network. A few years later, the hacker hacked the Playstation 3 and published security details on its website, which cost him a lawsuit from the company, but the case was settled out of court.
After brief stints at Google, SpaceX, and Facebook, he studied artificial intelligence at Carnegie Mellon University and continues to work on this technology, hoping to sell it directly to consumers or car companies through his startup, comma.ai.
Watch the video of what the hacker has achieved here:
[su_youtube_advanced url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTrgRYa2wbI”]
