Five crashes have pushed federal safety regulators to open an investigation into Comma.ai’s aftermarket hands-off system; two of those crashes killed three people.
Investigators at the Office of Defects Investigation describe a repeating pattern: the hardware failed to slow for a vehicle that was sitting or creeping in the same lane. The toll went beyond the deaths: in four of the episodes, up to 11 people were hurt, several of them badly.
In some cases the code behind the wheel was not the company’s own. According to the ODI, forked or modified builds were in play, and at least one death is linked to a version of that kind. One February crash in Ascension Parish, Louisiana killed two rear-seat passengers: a 2022 Toyota RAV4 running FrogPilot, a third-party fork of openpilot, struck a marked police vehicle parked in the left lane with its emergency lights on.
Comma.ai was founded in 2015 by hacker George Hotz and sells a device that manages adaptive cruise control and automated lane centering across a broad range of cars. Hotz pulled back from day-to-day operations in 2022. The company tells drivers to be ready to retake control at any moment, and its own documentation concedes that performance can suffer with a stationary vehicle ahead.
Systems that assist drivers have a long history of trouble with traffic that is not moving. Tesla and Ford are no strangers to federal inquiries of the same shape.
