Oh my god. Oh my god. Look at it go. It's driving itself.
Driving itself. Are you touching the gas? No, I'm not touching anything.
And guys, this is no Tesla with autopilot or whatever.
It's not a Waymo. This is like a five-year-old Toyota Corolla.
Oh, it needs a little help. It needs a little help. Oh.
Oh, look at it go. Look at it go.
It might smell a bit like mold and it definitely isn't much of a looker.
But with the help of this incredible piece of technology,
the Comma 3X and the open-source self-driving software it runs called OpenPilot,
this practical commuter car is now in the same class of self-driving as a base Tesla with autopilot,
making it into one of, if not the cheapest self-driving cars on the market.
I have wanted to try this guys for so freaking long.
And thanks to Ventrue, who sponsored this video sending over a bunch of their dashcams,
we can have all the angles when we show you guys exactly how easy it was to install
and what it feels like to have what is fundamentally a cell phone drive your car for you.
And did I mention it's open-source? You did, but it's cool enough to mention it twice.
There's no way that this is it. That is it.
This is the Comma 3X and this black box contains everything we need to turn the car I'm sitting in self-driving-ish.
Make driving chill. Oh my God, that's a lot of fine print.
Let me read the fine print. It actually says fine print.
Oh yeah. This is the bulk of the hardware and it's basically a phone with a Snapdragon processor,
128GB of built-in storage, a 2160x1080 OLED display, USB 3 and of course LTE, Wi-Fi and GPS.
The wild part though is that it's not even a high-end phone.
Like it's about on par with my old Galaxy Note 9 in terms of the performance.
What isn't on par with the Galaxy is of course the cameras.
It has two 180 degree lenses, one here and then one on the back in order to give it a 360 degree view
and then also has a narrow field camera to see far ahead.
It's cool that it's got the Comma logo on the back. Yeah, they actually do.
All the electronics assembly and design in the USA and they even have their own SMT line in their office
where all the circuit boards are made. So this hardware is fully custom and apparently they can make up to 500 of these things a week now.
It's not cheap. I mean a thousand US dollars is a pretty hefty price to ask for like a Note 9 tier hardware
but they are operating on a really small scale and on a hardware product that's made in the USA and fully custom?
Seems pretty reasonable especially when you consider the software development that goes along with a hardware product.
I mean it's open source but they're pushing most of it. And to their credit they are costing down the product over time rather than the other way around
which goes against the industry trends. This used to be more expensive.
If you look at a ton in the way of accessories, we've got a Toyota A adapter harness.
Yep. USBC which just goes right into there.
The right angle USBC here. That's what connects to the car. And then what is this?
That also connects to the car but it's technically optional.
That's like the power adapter. So if you have this in your car and you want it to be like uploading training data at night, you need that.
It keeps it powered. Oh, super cool. You can also GPS track your car with that plug in and it off and like remotely check in on it.
Oh, that's super cool. Like a Tesla. You have to pay money for that.
We'll get into that later. Yeah. All you need because I don't think it's fair for me to try to install this.
I work on cars all the time. I want to see how a normie would do it.
There's instructions. They're not specific to this car but there's instructions.
Cool. Step one, remove the rear view mirror cover trim.
This is where I'm going to stop you. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. That's step one.
I don't care. So like I said, I work on cars.
I don't know why these instructions don't include this but step one of working on any cars electronics
is disconnecting the battery. It probably doesn't matter.
And to be clear for our use case, I'm actually not going to do it because I want to see what
happens. But if you're doing this at home, you bought this thing, just disconnect your battery first.
Wait, wait, stop for a second. Trim tool? No, I got it.
No, damn it. There's a sponsor thing you f**k. Luckily, our sponsor, Ventrue, includes a little trim tool with a dash cam so you can
use that to get it off. It said to slide down, I think. Oh, here, this part.
Take this part off. Boom, there we go. And then now I'm supposed to do it.
Oh, sorry. Yeah. Hey.
How you doing, buddy? Connect car harness into the camera.
Oh, so I am disconnecting my existing camera.
You're putting it in line. To be honest, I don't know if it actually talks to that part of the car at all.
It definitely doesn't like analyze the feed. That's for sure.
I did see on like a Reddit post that someone said on cars that have blind spot monitoring
that it will stop a lane change if it gets detected on there. But I don't know if that's supported on all the cars.
That is kind of the thing about open source solutions is yeah, it's got a feature set.
Some of which may be implemented. Yeah. To their credit, a lot of it is just reverse engineering.
Like they just have to basically f**k around and find out.
Yeah, look here. We've got a little connect-a-ma-jig. Uh-huh.
And then we put our other connect-a-ma-jig right where that one was.
Okay. Oh, yeah, there we go. We plug this guy into here.
Got a little bit of VHB tape. Oh, they've got a nice little pulley tab for me on it.
Thanks, comma. I don't know if this spot's going to work, but I stuck it there.
This is killing my back sitting in here like this. I'm getting so old, dammit.
Where's the other one? Oh, wait. All right.
Here we go. Now I can get in here. Oh, wait, don't worry.
We're in a sweater. lttdstore.com lttdstore.com, baby.
Now we're going to plug our power cable into the car's OBD port.
A little something like that. So I'm kind of thinking we'll come across this way.
Yeah, buddy. Now I'm going to plug in this power connector.
Okay. Here's the other side of this power connector. We're going to cable manage this a little bit later.
And then now we're going to use, comma's got this funky USB cable that improves the clearance
for the back of the unit here. See it kind of, it's right angle, but it's like going off a weird wonky way.
So we're going to plug the other end into right here.
Now I'm just going to find somewhere to put this and honestly, there's not a lot of room.
Oh, bud. She's on. She's not going anywhere.
I don't think I managed to get the VHB tape attached to anything, but it's stuffed in there
so tight. Let's go, neighbor.
Step three, place mount high and centered on the windshield. It looks like you already did that.
Yeah. You're supposed to let it cure for 48 hours. So I stuck it on a little early.
Make sure all lenses are free of debris. Oh, look at that. I should have got you the apple polishing cloth.
No, you shouldn't have. Now all we got to do is pop this bad boy on here and then this slides into our mount.
A little something like, here we go, boom.
Just like that. Step five, reinstall the rear view mirror cover.
Trim. Oh, I already did that. So I'm done.
Pair your device with Kama Connect. All right. Let's do the setup guide.
This is one of those cases where I might actually recommend connecting to 2.4 gigahertz just
because your reception might not be great in your garage. It'll just kind of depend on where your access point is.
I think I can probably do five gigahertz, but your mileage may vary.
Or hotspot your phone. Choose software to install. Okay.
We're going to do open pilot this time, but there's actually, you know, like any open
source project, lots of people who have other ideas for how it should work.
And various forks that have their own strengths and their own potential weaknesses.
Yeah. Some of them look very compelling and we will try that later.
We're actually planning to do a long-term review as well where we try a couple of different
cars. I really want to see how it is compared to Tesla's built-in basic autopilot and maybe
full self-driving. I don't know. And then we also want to look at the other software options because apparently some
of them are really good and like add things like you can make it so it follows really
closely. Say you're in LA traffic and you don't want people cutting in front of you.
I feel like a dick, but with the computer. That's pretty cool.
We should actually have a few different drivers try a potential too. Yeah.
Get subscribed so you don't miss it. Oh, is it almost done? Oh, it's doing a software update.
Yeah. So there is an operating system on it right now, obviously. I can't remember what it's called, but it's Linux-based.
And what it's installing right now is it's kind of like an app, basically.
But that app takes over everything. I can't believe how painless this was.
Like even filming it, you know, so redoing takes and all that, dude, we've been here less
than an hour. Oh yeah. Very just, yeah, DIY, you just chuck it in your car.
If you watched a video of somebody else doing it beforehand and you had all the cables ready
and you knew how to take that thing off, you could do this in 10 minutes. Before we drive, we're going to sign in and we get what?
Remote access, 24-7 LTE, a year of drive storage and remote snapshots.
If you pay for it. Oh, is there a benefit to signing in if you don't have a Prime subscription?
It allows you to look at your drive videos for the last three days. That's what they'll keep for you.
Kind of like a dash cam, or you can pay a certain amount of money to get all of those
features and a data connection, or you can pay like 10 bucks a month to get all those
features and you use your own SIM card. I don't think that the one including data even works in Canada, but why would you pay
for a subscription for like dash cam functionality? When you can just get a dash cam from our sponsor, Ventrue.
We have their Nexus 4 Pro S here, which is their new dash cam.
It has triple channel recording, including 4K on the main channel.
It's got a remote third camera that's waterproof. You could even put it outside.
So you got like a big sprinter van. You could stick it on the outside. Oh, that's pretty cool.
It has like a rear view camera if you wanted. They use Sony Starvis sensors. You can use their plate picks thing to have better clarity for license plate stuff.
Oh, that's huge. It's got GPS. It's got LTE if you want it with an add on.
It's kind of the bees knees. And they also gave us a few more. We've got the E1 Pro down here, which is a single lens camera.
And then there's another one at the back. That's a 360 camera that even has a 360 action cam mode.
You can take it out of your car and use it like a 360 cam if you want. Cool.
So thanks to Venture for sponsoring this and we'll have a bunch of footage of the drive because of them.
Okay. Sure. Yeah, I'll put the fire hose.
That just means it uploads more data for them to train. It's an open source project, but it's also a like distributed training pool.
So when you drive, even when you're not using open pilot to drive for you, it's recording
and it can upload clips. And they even allow you, if you want, depending on your privacy settings to upload the driver
facing camera data, if you want to help train their driver attention models.
I had abled that. Normally, I would not ever put my seatbelt under my ARM.
You're not supposed to do that, but my microphone is here. So yeah.
Are you scared? You seem like a bit tense. I'm a little tense.
If we die, there's going to be so much footage of it.
Here we go. Okay. Drive above 15 miles per hour.
It's Canada, you f***. Oh yeah. Let's change that.
I'm finding the interface really intuitive. You just tap it, and then it brings up the settings cog, and then you just use metrics
system. Look at that. Let's go.
We'll just do aggressive driving personality. No. Standard.
Let's start with standard. Whoa. See, look.
It's already charting the course. Well, let's get out to the road. So it's very important that when you mount this thing that you put it centered, otherwise
your car will like lane keep off center. Okay.
Okay. Calibration in progress 98%. So that looks pretty good.
Oh my lanta. Oh, Jesus. Take control.
Would it say the turn exceeds a what now? One thing that it doesn't do yet, when you're on the highway and there's like a corner,
it's not going to slow down based on that. That's a feature that's also like in forks.
So they can do it based on looking at the view and also using satellite data as to like
the curves of the road. But you can be on a highway and it can have a pretty aggressive corner and it will still
try to do 100. But that's also a problem in Tesla's autopilot.
Okay. Here we go. Here we go.
Here we go. Over the line. Yeah.
This is some not very good. So far. Yeah.
Nope. Nope. Turn exceeds steering limit.
Okay. Okay. There we go.
There we go. You know what? That might be a thing with this car.
The lane centering cruise control of this car might not have the functionality to turn
beyond that. Theoretically, it's detecting this red light, right?
Okay. It stopped on its own.
My feet are completely off the pedals. My hands are completely off the wheel. Is it going to go?
No, it's not going to go. Okay. So I tapped the accelerator.
Is it going to go? Oh yeah. She's going.
She's thinking. Changing the... Uh, yo, it, it, I mean, it changed the lines.
It obviously won't signal for you. So it's kind of like driving a BMW.
Jesus. Let's see how it handles this.
Oh dude. It just drove us into a turning lane. Yeah.
I had to completely intervene there and this light is green and it just tried to stop
me. Okay.
It doesn't have navigation. There was a navigate feature that they were testing for a bit, but because they're still
trying to work on the actual driving model and getting that to be really good, adding
that into the training stuff just made everything way more complicated. And so they removed that for now.
Let's see if it can stop at the stop sign. Hey.
Nice. Okay. But is it just going to go?
Nope. This is me. Okay.
I'm just driving myself a lot less stressful.
What exactly is it that made us choose the Toyota Corolla? If you look on their page of compatibility, you know, it's like 300 cars now, which is
great, except not all of them are supported at the same level.
Some of them don't allow the, uh, like auto stop, start from a stoplight or stopping at
red lights, um, at all, even in experimental mode. Some of them only do the lane centering above a certain speed.
There's just limitations based on the hardware of the car and how much development has gone
into it. The reason to why we couldn't just install this into Ploof's car, like there just has
to be support for it. That car has no electric anything.
You can't just make an analog hydraulic steering rack turn itself.
The car has to support the features to begin with. On top of that, we wanted a car that was cheap.
It wasn't going to work in your Porsche because they don't support it. I guess there's not a lot of Porsche dudes that want this in their car.
So with Linus being a little bit cheap, I wanted to find what is the cheapest self-driving
car we could make. And this was the cheapest one with the full feature set.
Hey, a roundabout. Oh God. Let's see what happens in a roundabout, boys.
I don't think you should have the turn signal on, but it's, I mean, it's, yeah, okay.
Nope, nope, nope. Okay, I got you, I got you, I got you, I got you, I got you, fam, I got you.
Fam. We're real close to that curb, boys.
Oh, oh, oh, no, no, we weren't.
Brother, I'm on this side. I can see. I disagree.
Uh, uh, let's see what it does. Let's see what it does. No, it doesn't know.
It tried to turn. No, no, it made the right call. Dude, it made the right call.
It just took too long to figure it out. Yeah. And it couldn't turn that sharply.
I actually, I'm pretty impressed by how it handled that. I could see how much better this would be if it had navigation data.
Like live navigation feed would make this so much more powerful because it's not taking
into account that the road is going to turn soon. It's just looking at what the cameras can see.
Okay. Take control, turning seats, steering wheel.
Yeah, that's fine. No, no, I got you. I got you.
I got you. Okay. I was kind of like, oh, she's just going, she was just going to like plow into the back
of this. Yeah. It's only lane change assist, remember?
I wouldn't even call that an assist. I would call that just sending it to this is where it should shine.
I just can't believe this is like open source. Right.
We've mentioned it a handful of times. I know. But it even bears mentioning more times because that is so cool.
Just makes me imagine, dude, like this running on like an M4.
Okay. No, no, not the car. No, no, I know what you mean.
But also, yes, that would be cool. What I was going to say, they actually built out support for having an external GPU.
Really? So you could run like a huge model on this thing.
But the car's free. Literally.
Why not? You could have more processing power than like a hardware for Tesla pretty easily, which
I mean, to be honest, that's the other thing I haven't considered up until this point.
This is like a five year old smartphone. Is it more than five years?
More. To compare the hardware they're running on to the kind of like neural processing, like
that's taken off in that last half a decade that we have on modern devices.
With an AMD GPU. And like they're using TinyGrad, which is like GeoHots company where they're developing
like open AI drivers framework, everything, right?
Oh, yeah. Oh, we're changing lanes. Oh, dude, that's so cool.
That was awesome. It totally warned me. So imagine if you gave this thing like a 9070XT in an eGPU dock and just like stuffed
it in your trunk. She's going. We have to do that.
That has to be part three. Yeah, but just because you're such a sketch case, like just breathe.
I haven't intervened at all since we got on the highway.
I didn't even touch the steering wheel at all. Other than to tell it, hey, I wanted to change lanes, which is totally fine.
I know that it's just like adaptive cruise control and lane keep it like every car I've
ever driven with that sort of stuff. It's just like, man, this is, I really, really need to pay attention because it does just
like dirt about randomly. And like on the highway, that was, I could have had my eyes closed the whole time.
Not that you would or could, but in an alternate universe, I totally could have.
The braking is pretty damn smooth.
Really good. I didn't even think about it, which is honestly the strongest endorsement that I could give
for it. The acceleration is a little aggressive sometimes, but the braking is shockingly smooth.
Have you touched the steering wheel like at all or the gas or the brake? No, brother.
Wow. It's really smooth. Yup.
I would have believed that that was a human, like a, like somebody that's trying to be
good. Yes. That like gives a other passengers.
Yeah. Yeah. Whoa.
Dude. That's pretty cool. Dude.
Supposedly because this is like actually like a very state of the art, like machine vision,
AI, whatever you want to call it, neural network model versus like some of the car ones where
it's like just looking for straight white lines or straight yellow lines.
It's supposed to be pretty good at handling like nuanced situations where the lines are
faded or there's construction lines or you're going to country where there's places that
there aren't lines all the time or in construction or yada, yada, yada.
This is awesome. This is pretty cool. Like this is so I, if I had a car that supported this, I would buy this right now.
To be clear, that endorsement is not necessarily because I'm financially irresponsible.
Yes. But he would buy it to play with it because it's really cool to play with, but let us
at least do the longterm one before we give you guys some kind of solid, hey, we feel
this is worth it. And also just supporting this project. I have a really important question though.
In your research for this video, did you check the legality of what we're doing at all?
It depends. So OpenPilot says they designed the way that this system works based on the same guidelines
that automakers stick to. There is also some things to consider depending on where you live.
Some jurisdictions don't allow you technically speaking to have anything obstructing the
driver's view. You're not supposed to have dash cams. You're not supposed to have radar detectors.
You're not supposed to have anything on your windscreen.
That is a consideration. It's not a problem here, but that's something to check.
Here we go. Here we go. She's going.
She's going just like that. And there's like cones. Like there's no line on that side.
That's really cool. It's tracking that line though. Okay.
Let's see if I don't, this might be too much turn. Let's see.
Let's see. I think she can do it. Okay.
All right. All right. She almost did it.
Okay. If I, that's interesting. You probably just need to help it a little bit.
Yeah. Oh, I didn't actually mention this. It's designed to be like a collaborative thing.
So a lot of the self driving features in other cars are like as soon as you touch the steering
wheel, it stops. Oh yeah. This is meant to be like you can give it a little bit more and it will, it will work
with you. I'd love to see once their hardware gets a little bit more advanced, I'd love to see
them integrate that into their training. Yeah.
I think they do. They probably do. Do they?
Okay. Cause as an open source project, I'm way more comfortable just like, yeah, sure.
Upload all my sh**. Yeah. You know what I mean?
Yeah. It totally stopped there by the way. Yeah.
Totally did. That was awesome. That's crazy.
That was really fun. Yeah. Check out the video where we put Android Auto in Ploof's car.
Oh yeah. That was awesome. That was fun too.
I wish we could put this in Ploof's car, but this is also still really cool.