Driver Monitoring (DM) has been a persistent hot topic in the Comma community, especially for users who find the current model a bit too sensitive. In a recent discussion, Adeeb Shihadeh, Chief Product Officer at Comma.ai, shared some rare behind-the-scenes insight into where things stand — and where they’re headed.
“We have not worked on DM for about a year. DM is definitely not a good experience for a small percent of users, and as the user base has grown, the absolute number of people with a bad time is decently large now. This is not a simple bugfix, and we do not think the tradeoff of removing the tooDistracted lockout for those small percent of users is worth it.”
Adeeb noted that certain conditions tend to trigger false positives for DM lockouts — things like driving position, sunglasses, and time of day glare. In the case that prompted this response, all three were in play.
Why Development Paused
For roughly the past year, the DM team hasn’t been actively improving the driver monitoring stack. Instead, they’ve been contributing to another major area of Openpilot’s evolution: making the driving models smarter. One example of that work is the recent cone test project, which you can explore here.
What’s Next
The good news for drivers struggling with oversensitive alerts? DM development is picking back up next month. Adeeb says the team is “pretty optimistic for some big gains just from leveraging modern ML techniques and models available for groundtruth.”
That could mean a much smoother experience for users who currently face lockouts due to lighting conditions, eyewear, or seating position — without compromising DM’s core safety role.
As with most Comma development, there’s no official ETA for public release, but renewed focus on DM signals a significant quality-of-life upgrade on the horizon for Comma 3X owners running Openpilot.