The $1,000 Hack That Turns Everyday Cars Hands-Free

0:00What we noticed more is that we've moved AI off the screen into the physical world. That's Tanguy Katlan, senior partner at McKinsey and director of the McKinsey Global Institute. AI, he says, no longer lives in a computer, but is tangible in robotics, engineering, space travel, and more. One of the 14 key points identified by McKinsey in its 2026 Technology Trends Outlook. At the break, join McKinsey to learn how these trends are shaping innovation and how leaders should respond.

0:33Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, November 3rd. I'm Julie Chang for The Wall Street Journal. Do you wish you had opted for advanced driver assistance systems or ADAS technology when purchasing your vehicle? Now, aftermarket options exist. For about$1 ,000, drivers can install a device enabling hands-free automated driving capabilities. Matt Peake is one of these driving DIY tech enthusiasts who hooked up an aftermarket device developed by Kama AI directly into his Chrysler Pacifica minivan. So right now, speed limit's 55 on this road. I'll go to 55, and I've set the cruise, and now you see a green dot and a green lane, and that means it's taken over for me.

1:26and scary as heck the first time you do it. Journal reporter Christopher Otz rode along with Peak to see this driver assistance system in action. He joins us to break down how these devices work, the safety and regulatory concerns they raise, and what happens when third-party software controls the wheel. Chris, what do these devices look like? It looks a lot like a dash camera. It really just is a little box with, you know, a camera facing forward and a camera facing back at the driver. And it's kind of mounted up underneath the rearview mirror on the windshield. And then it kind of plugs in to a place in the vehicle.

2:16It's not that conspicuous. And how exactly do they work? You mentioned that they plug into the vehicle, but where do they plug in? How would I be able to install it on my vehicle? The aftermarket devices come with a wiring harness in them that plugs into the vehicle's factory automated driving control. What I saw with the Chrysler Pacifica is that there's a module underneath the rearview mirror and the customer plugged the Kama device into this module. And if you think about it, it's like wires in a series. The Kama sort of gets placed into that series. And so the vehicle's signals that it's getting from the environment, from cameras, et cetera, are going into the Kama.

3:12And then the Kama is then feeding its own directions. to the vehicle's equipment to control the steering, the braking, etc. And can these devices be installed on any car? They cannot be installed on any car, but they can be installed on a surprising number of recent model cars. The car needs to have functionality for automated driving. Usually this is in the form of adaptive cruise control or lane keeping assist. So these sort of basic functionalities are what Kama and the other aftermarket ADAS devices can build on top of. Cars that don't have that basic functionality are not good candidates or not possible to retrofit with these devices.

4:09You sat passenger seat with someone driving with one of these devices. What was that like? It was pretty wild. So we got out of his neighborhood and we got onto like a two lane road and he got the minivan up to about 55 miles an hour and hit a button. And there was a little beep and the comma device underneath the rear view mirror turned to green. and it has a little camera that shows you what it's seeing ahead, how it's keeping the lane. And it actually worked very well. It was pretty indistinguishable from if he had had a factory kind of setting, Blue Cruise or a Super Cruise or a Tesla FSD.

4:57It does not do things like stop at stop signs and navigate. You can't tell it where you want to go and have it drive for you. That is a capability that is beyond these aftermarket systems at this point. But for long road trips and just mundane highway driving, from what I saw, it works remarkably well. Did you experience any challenging driving situations like someone cutting you off on the road? We did not while we were doing this demonstration. It was a weekday suburban Detroit. I did witness several times the device making warnings and saying, pay attention, pay attention. So the person that I was riding with is a retired aircraft mechanic, and he's a very responsible driver to hear him tell it.

5:53And certainly he was extremely attentive while we were doing this. And that's one of the really important things to remember here that these devices are never designed to enable drivers to not pay attention and to not be vigilant. They really require a vigilant driver to be in the driver's seat to work well because there were a lot of engagements and disengagements going to green and then going to orange with a warning or a heads up and then going back to green. So it certainly is not a set it and forget it type technology. So how do you think it would do on a busy road? Well, so from what I witnessed, the device was capable of keeping a sort of cruising speed on a highway or a bigger road.

6:51In fact, it would only engage at 40 miles an hour. So once you got below 40 miles an hour, the Kama device would say, hey, you have to take over. I'm not capable of operating at lower speeds. Now, that may be specific to this car. The settings and capabilities range from vehicle to vehicle. But in terms of just keeping a vehicle in traffic at a predictable speed, I think it does pretty well. Okay, so we know there's Kama AI. Who are the other companies in the space? We found one called Sidecar, but this space was really pioneered by this company Kama that was founded by a coder and has a very sort of hacker ethos to it.

7:44Would you install an aftermarket driver assistance device on your vehicle? If you're a listener on Spotify, let us know in the comments. Coming up, we'll look at the risks, the regulations, and what these third-party systems mean for the future of driving. That's after the break.

8:07AI is delivering tremendous advances in areas like scientific discovery and engineering. But as Tangi Katlan, senior partner in McKinsey and director of the McKinsey Global Institute notes, breakthroughs only happen when leaders set the table effectively. You can only optimize and improve the performance of the system if you improve every single component of the system. To really unlock the full potential of those technologies, you're going to need to start from a blank sheet and redesign the processes and trends. Later, Katlan explains how leaders identify the trends that matter most to their businesses.

8:39Welcome back. We've been talking about aftermarket driving assistance tech out there. So Chris, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there have been at least five crashes, including three deaths and 14 injuries linked to Kama AI. And per police and incident reports viewed by the journal, some drivers have fallen asleep or slammed into stopped vehicles while using Kama AI's device. What have regulators done about this? Yes, there have been some crashes and fatalities. And in September, the auto safety regulator in the U.S., NHTSA, opened an investigation into the Kama device.

9:25And what has Kama AI said in response to those incidents? Kama did not want to comment on either the NHTSA probe or any of these particular accidents that we were inquiring about, the evidence from the police reports and the reporting, etc. But what Kama was willing to say is that they feel like they have actually one of the most validated self-driving systems out there, that their users have logged over 400 million miles collectively to date, and that car owners have the right to retrofit their vehicles with these devices. And Kama AI stressed that no system on the market today is made to allow a driver to be inattentive and that their system must work in conjunction with an attentive alert driver who is still in control and still responsible for ensuring safety.

10:37How is it even possible to have these devices for sale in the market? There are no federal standards about this sort of driver assistance technology right now. And we know that the federal safety regulators are busy enough, frankly, investigating the automaker systems such as Tesla's FSD, Ford's Blue Cruise. These third party devices just add another layer to this. So what does the emergence of such devices tell us about where driving technology is headed? It's really interesting because many automakers are racing to enable these driver assistance features and to get closer and closer to autonomous driving.

11:28Rivian is talking about going point-to-point navigation soon. GM is saying that they will soon have an eyes-off application where you can be in a vehicle on the highway and take your eyes off the road as well as your hands off the wheel. And the key thing here is that automakers see this as a lucrative source of revenue. They are looking for other alternatives to their traditional business and they are quite infatuated with the idea of getting ongoing monthly payments for these capabilities that they can sell to consumers. Tesla has talked a lot about how their FSD system is now the main selling point for their vehicles.

12:16They're not designing new cars anymore because their approach now is we have this self-driving capability and we know you're going to want to buy any car that comes with that. So these aftermarket devices come in and disrupt that a little bit by offering people an alternative. And there are people who have Kama devices on their Tesla, on their Rivian, and they see it as a one-time purchase that saves them from having an ongoing monthly cost and worth the tradeoff with that. so where everything shakes out is going to be very fascinating to watch that was wsj reporter chris otts and that's it for tech news briefing if you're a listener on spotify be sure to leave us a comment today's show was produced by me julie chang with supervising producers katie ferguson and melanie roy we'll be back tomorrow with a new episode thanks for listening

13:26Autonomy, absorption speed, cybersecurity, co-design of chips and models, unlocking the capacity that we need in the grid and energy. That's McKinsey's Tanguy Katlan, discussing five key themes outlined in McKinsey's 2026 Technology Trends Outlook, a comprehensive view of what's shaping today's tech landscape and where we might be tomorrow. Leaders, Katlan says, can examine the 14 trends McKinsey identifies and apply the learnings to their unique business context without chasing headlines. The competitive advantage comes from the intersection of proprietary data, workflows, and the ability to rewire the operating model, not from the trend that gets the most capital or gets the most attention to press.

14:07It's how you're going to redesign your end-to-end workflows, take advantage of your own proprietary context and data, and the ability to rewire the operating model at upskill.org. That's where actually you win. For more, visit McKinsey.com. This content was created by Custom Content from WSJ, a unit of the Wall Street Journal Advertising Department.