Hacker News Reader

Comment by hangonhn | Hacker News Reader

Wow. If he really moves his project to China to take advantage of a lax regulatory environment even though he couldn't pass the scrutiny in the US, he's being very immoral and cavalier about people's lives in China.

I don't understand how a startup like Cruise can get past this regulatory hurlde in the US but Hotz can't.

View on HN

I am no expert in Chinese transportation laws and regulations. But I wouldn't say it's a lax environment there - it's more ad hoc to be more accurate as I've seen regulation coming out from time to time in response to events.

On the other hand, Shenzhen is the world capital of electronic / hardware components sourcing, manufacturing & production. Geohot's trip to Shenzhen may or maynot be an indication of his intention of releasing comma one in China but rather an expected visit to check up his product manufacturing.

Also, perhaps Cruise have already been dealing with government agencies and perhaps in compliance of regulatory requirements so that we don't hear about same trouble for Cruise.

If China's transportation regulations are anything like their import/export regulations..."lax" isn't the right way to describe them, more aptly described as "influenced in your favor by money paid to the right people".

Disclaimer: Worked for a company exporting an "organic" product from China - which meant paying the harbor master a rather large fee per ship to have them labeled as such. When the product arrives in the US and other countries, it's treated as being whatever it is labeled as.

I assume he was just visiting for manufacturing purposes.

What's interesting in China is they have in the past executed people for white collar crime in addition to regulatory officials as well. This though can happen for a variety of reasons unrelated to regulation, rather corruption, being in a rival faction of the wrong people, etc. Anyway, I am not saying it happens a lot or every day, but rather it seems tolerance with regard to regulators and corporations is not necessarily unlimited, especially depending on who's pockets you are lining and where you are from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_Xiaoyu

If that is his intention, it is also risky from a business perspective. China does have laws and regulations, even if they haven't yet set many laws on self-driving facilities. Understanding those, and appealing to the Chinese population, are very difficult business and marketing tasks, much greater than trying to develop a business in a country he knows, in a culture he understands.

Google, Uber, and so many others have struggled and are struggling still.

It will be fun when he realizes the lack of road markings and overall road quality/traffic mess in China makes it much harder than driving in your avg. US road (especially in California)

...which means that if he's successful his product will likely be more robust than ones worked through in less challenging environments.

Here in North Texas I just took a weird exchange between two major highways (I-30E to Loop 12N) and at night, poorly marked lanes, very aggressive exit/entry points, and the first thought that popped into my head was "There's no way a Tesla autopilot - or anything - on the market today could navigate this at posted speed even in ideal conditions."

I'm sure it's a bit over-the-top of me to come up with such useless tests, but I love driving and wish there was as much emphasis on actual driver education as there is on innovating driver-less vehicles.

Programming a neural network to learn to drive is fun; dealing with lawyers is not.

I don't think it is a matter of passing the regulatory hurdle; it's a matter of not wanting to deal with it.

That's absurd. You hire people to work on regulatory concerns, then.

So did he naively expect that he would not have to deal with the legal issues?

His rep (from people I know who know him personally) is such that actually doing anything that doesn't involve a computer sending him into paroxysms of rage sounds completely in-character.

Someone should have told the people who funded him.

Led by a16z [1], and I think the partner is Chris Dixon.

[1]: https://medium.com/@cdixon/comma-ai-e62eea5fa8d2

Even if he won't encounter such "regulatory hurdles" in China, he'll encounter cultural ones. If anything I'd expect that to be harder.

My guess is that there are other problems with the comma one system, and he is using this as an excuse to back out (not so) gracefully from his previous statements.

They may turn a blind eye in certain cases but China doesn't screw around if something goes wrong. You do hard time or worse.

Not to mention pretty risky for himself. If his invention kills someone in China, he will probably end up wishing he was dealing with US legal system (and/or US prison).

Tell that to the millions of people who have already died because self driving car technology isn't here yet, because the government is stopping it.

I actually think that the government has been surprisingly open and helpful for self driving technology (and I'm a Libertarian so I don't say that lightly).

The media on the other hand... I am sure filling the 24x7 news cycle up every time one of these cars gets in an accident and never covering the advancements has a chilling effect.

A huge proportion of commercial self-driving car projects have senior technical staff who were involved in the DARPA challenges and the surrounding research projects.

It's hard to over-state the role of federal R&D funding in the development of self-driving tech.

Right now, as of this moment, self driving cars are much safer than human drivers.

Every accident that happens and person who dies is a death that could have been easily prevented if companies had been allowed to go to market last year.

> Right now, as of this moment, self driving cars are much safer than human drivers

Maybe if you limit the scope to the sunny streets of California. Maybe. Yours is a ridiculous statement that is not backed by any facts. Humans are adept at driving in conditions that self driving cars are incapable of handleing. How many self-driven miles have been logged in torrential downpours and on snowed-over roads?

If self driving cars aren't good at driving in the rain, then you can just NOT drive them in the rain.

Even in sunny conditions, humans are still bad at driving.

If half of our driving time can be replaced with safer self driving, that is still a huge win.

You still save lives when you make safe driving conditions (sunny California) even safer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com