Yours is the very essence of a HackerNews comment. Comma is everything a startup should be. They are not wrapping a lame business model in CRUD and living off of malinvestment. They are solving ridiculously hard problem with a small team of very smart people. Their competition has burnt billions. Meanwhile, Comma is profitable, has a better safety model than anyone.
This is a straw-man. I did not compare Comma to any other startup, or some bizarre ideal of "what a startup should be."
I strongly disagree that Comma "have a better safety model than anyone" - their entire safety model revolves around two things, an assertion that the driver is fully responsible, and a poorly documented set of callback functions in their CAN-intercept board which, depending on the vehicle, do different things, but generally try to limit angular input and introduce an emergency override. This is smart, but the code is not documented well enough to be considered a "safety model" in any commercial sense, and the system, while it has a MISRA C linter plugged into it somewhere, is not built using safety-approved hardware or to any known safety standard. Plus, the fundamental approach on most cars involving CAN message-stuffing simply cannot be as reliable as an integrated system - in that sense, the entire model is flawed and cannot "have a better safety model than anyone."
And, Hotz explicitly and openly left the United States and cancelled his first Comma product launch, rather than respond to a letter NHTSA sent him asking questions about Comma's testing protocols and safety process. Call that what you will.
