The device is a small box with a camera that sits behind the windshield and takes over the steering. Its maker promised to “make driving chill.” Federal regulators now want to know whether it also made driving deadly.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened an investigation into Comma.ai, the startup founded by hacker George Hotz, after five reported crashes involving its aftermarket driver-assistance technology. Two of the crashes killed three people, and as many as 11 people were injured across four of them, some seriously.
The agency’s Office of Defects Investigation said this week that the crashes involved Comma devices failing to detect or respond to slow or stopped vehicles in the same lane. Those failures are the kind of basic task that defines the limits of driver-assistance systems, and the probe will examine why they happened.
Comma, founded in 2015, sells hardware and software called openpilot that plugs into a wide range of modern cars. The system controls a vehicle’s adaptive cruise control and lane centering to perform functions the company compares to Tesla’s Autopilot and General Motors’ Super Cruise. Drivers are told they must remain able to take back control at any moment.
Hotz’s reputation preceded the company. As a teenager he was the first person to jailbreak an iPhone, and he later hacked Sony’s PlayStation 3, a feat that drew a lawsuit the company eventually settled. He founded Comma with a plan to sell a $999 aftermarket kit that would give cars near-autonomous capability, then canceled the product the next year after regulators asked questions about its safety. The company re-emerged with the more modest openpilot approach, and Hotz left daily operations in 2022.
The complication for regulators is that some of the vehicles involved were not running Comma’s software at all. At least one fatal crash involved a “forked” version of openpilot, a third-party modification known as FrogPilot that changes how the system behaves.
In February, a 2022 Toyota RAV4 running FrogPilot struck a stopped first-responder vehicle in Ascension Parish, Louisiana. Two rear-seat passengers died. Louisiana State Police described a crash that matches an entry in the federal database. Another injury crash, in Cameron, Missouri, involved a Honda Accord traveling about 82 miles per hour before impact.
The presence of modified software goes to the center of the investigation. Comma has told regulators the device in the fatal Louisiana crash ran third-party code, and that this limits the company’s ability to reconstruct what went wrong. The company said it has cooperated with the agency and provided the data it requested.
The question of who is responsible when open-source driving software is altered by someone else has no settled answer. Comma released openpilot under an open-source license, a choice that built a community of tinkerers and forks but also ceded a measure of control over what runs in customers’ cars.
That trade-off is familiar to the auto industry. Tesla and GM sell closed systems they can update and lock down remotely. Comma’s approach treats a car’s existing driver-assistance hardware as a platform, and the modifications flourish precisely because the code is open.
The investigation also lands amid a wider reckoning over how closely regulators should watch driver assistance. NHTSA has spent years probing Tesla’s Autopilot and other systems after crashes, and the agency has repeatedly emphasized that such systems are not self-driving. What sets Comma apart is the aftermarket model: the company sells the hardware, publishes the software, and leaves much of the tuning to a community of hobbyists. That structure has no clean parallel in the traditional auto industry.
The crashes fall under the agency’s Standing General Order, which requires makers of Level 2 driver-assistance systems to report certain incidents. Those systems expect a human driver to remain attentive at all times, a standard the investigation will test against the reality of how the devices are actually used.
Comma’s driver-monitoring camera is meant to catch distracted or drowsy drivers and push them to re-engage. But the agency’s description of the crashes, in which vehicles failed to brake for objects directly ahead, suggests the systems may not have performed as designed in the moments that mattered.
The probe arrives as consumer driver assistance spreads faster than the rules governing it. Millions of cars now ship with some form of assisted steering, and aftermarket kits let owners add similar capability to cars that never had it. The Comma investigation will help decide whether that gray market gets treated like a product or a project.
Hotz has not commented on the investigation, and the company has said little beyond confirming its cooperation. For regulators, the work now is to untangle a fatal chain that runs from a small camera behind the windshield to a stopped vehicle in a Louisiana lane, and to decide where the responsibility begins.
