Open Source on the Open Road
Forget the car of the future, openpilot is bringing autonomy to the car in your driveway.
I stumbled across this in my YouTube feed the other night—Linus Tech Tips was testing something called openpilot, and I nearly spilled my Syntharabica Quantum Roast all over the console of the janky time machine.
It’s open-source software that turns certain cars (300+ models at the time writing this) into semi-autonomous vehicles. Real self-driving features: automatic lane centering, adaptive cruise control, driver monitoring. Level 2+. Not a concept. Not a teaser. Something you can actually install in your car … for $999.
It feels like something out of a design fiction workshop or autonomous automobile magazine. The kind of speculative tech we’d imagine showing up five years from now in some underground zine or near-future product catalogue. But no, this one’s already here. On GitHub. With a dev community. With install instructions.
The Linus test? Revealing. It’s far from perfect. There were definitely edge cases, odd behaviors, and the occasional “cheesus take the wheel” moment. It’s not for the faint of heart. But in the spirit of “this is as bad as it will ever be,” it’s not hard to see where this is heading. Openpilot is already good enough to raise eyebrows, and it’s improving daily. A viable alternative to corporate paywalled driver-assist features is on the way, and it's being built out in the open.
The fact that it’s open source1 makes it even wilder. Anyone can fork the code and tweak it—optimize it for winter driving, adjust it for aggressive city merging, or localize it for road laws in other countries. Instead of one vision of autonomy, we’re potentially looking at a world of regional driving cultures encoded into codebases.
So yeah, I present you with another case of reality being stranger than design fiction.
Open Source or Open Sores? … are you willing to try it?