How a College Kid Made His Honda Civic Self-Driving for $700

Every time I hear about stuff like this, I&#x27;m reminded of the words of Jeremy Clarkson:<p>&quot;It&#x27;s a brilliant idea, designed by very smart people, but one day you know that this will be bought by a man named Keith, and he is going to wake up one morning and think he can service it himself. And you won’t be able to relax in your autonomobile [sic] because you know that Keith is in his, coming the other way.&quot;<p>I really hope that humanity will be able to advance fast enough, to keep up with the advances in self-driving and assisted-driving vehicles.

<i>Who needs a Tesla when you can build your own automated copilot using free hardware designs and software available online?</i><p>These days you can 3d print a .45, but would you really wrap your hand around that thing and squeeze the trigger?<p>This is a car...

&gt; <i>“I am less interested in full autonomy and more in preventing rear-endings,” he says. “A lot of existing cars can be retrofitted.”</i><p>Would love it if my elderly parents could enjoy such automation to assist in avoiding minor accidents, while preserving their autonomy. They won&#x27;t likely be buying any new cars at this point. But retrofitting their existing cars with some bump and crash avoidance functionality would be great.

I guess my main concern is that I, daily, see that a lot of software is just about working when it is shipped. I would love to be able to program my car, but I do wonder about the people who are running the hypothetical dev version which still pulls to the right. Or just download something from Github and run it.

I think in these articles it is important to list what level of self-driving car this is. From the article it sounds like a 1 or a 2.<p>One thing articles like this do bring up is that we may be able to retrofit a lot of existing cars which could shorten the adoption delay caused by people keeping their cars 10+ years.