iPhone Hacker George Hotz Built a Self-Driving Car in His Garage

The man responsible for the first iPhone hack is taking on the big boys from Google and Tesla with his own self-driving car… that he built in his home garage. 26-year-old George Hotz outfitted a white 2016 Acura ILX with a lidar (laser-based radar) system and a rearview-mounted camera, all routed into a Linux- powered computer system housed in the glove box, controlled via joystick, with a 21.5-inch monitor mounted on the dashboard.

Hotz, also known as “geohot” online, is the first person to use hardware to jailbreak an iPhone from former exclusive carrier AT&T and to crack the PlayStation 3. He took Bloomberg Business journalist Ashlee Vance – author of a recent book on Elon Musk – for a test-drive in the homemade automated vehicle.

“The car does, more or less, have it,” Vance reports. “It stays true around the first bend. Near the end of the second, the Acura suddenly veers near an SUV to the right; I think of my soon-to-be-fatherless children; the car corrects itself.”

The self-driving system is designed only to function on highways – chaotic urban roads require more variables to consider, and are thus harder to program for – but this prototype is only the start for Hotz, and he is building his own version of the Mobileye self-driving system that features in Tesla electric cars.

“He’s building a kit consisting of six cameras—similar to the $13 ones found in smartphones—that would be placed around the car,” Vance says. “Two would go inside near the rearview mirror, one in the back, two on the sides to cover blind spots, and a fisheye camera up top. He then trains the control software for the cameras using what’s known as a neural net—a type of self-teaching artificial-intelligence mechanism that grabs data from drivers and learns from their choices. The goal is to sell the camera and software package for $1,000 a pop either to automakers or, if need be, directly to consumers who would buy customized vehicles at a showroom run by Hotz.”