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What is a car port?

A car port enables openpilot support on a particular car. Each car model openpilot supports needs to be individually ported. The complexity of a car port varies depending on many factors including:

  • existing openpilot support for similar cars
  • architecture and APIs available in the car

Structure of a car port

All car-specific code is contained in the opendbc project.

opendbc

Each car brand is supported by a standard interface structure in opendbc/car/[brand]:

  • interface.py: Interface for the car, defines the CarInterface class
  • carstate.py: Reads CAN messages from the car and builds openpilot CarState messages
  • carcontroller.py: Control logic for executing openpilot CarControl actions on the car
  • [brand]can.py: Composes CAN messages for carcontroller to send
  • values.py: Limits for actuation, general constants for cars, and supported car documentation
  • radar_interface.py: Interface for parsing radar points from the car, if applicable

safety

  • opendbc/safety/modes/[brand].h: Brand-specific safety logic
  • opendbc/safety/tests/test_[brand].py: Brand-specific safety CI tests

openpilot

For historical reasons, openpilot still contains a small amount of car-specific logic. This will eventually be migrated to opendbc or otherwise removed.

  • selfdrive/car/car_specific.py: Brand-specific event logic

How do I port car?

Jason Young gave a talk at COMMA_CON with an overview of the car porting process. The talk is available on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxPS5TpTUnI

Brand Port

A brand port is a port of openpilot to a substantially new car brand or platform within a brand.

Here's an example of one: https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/pull/23331.

Model Port

A model port is a port of openpilot to a new car model within an already supported brand. Model ports are easier than brand ports because the car's existing APIs are already known.

Here's an example of one: https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/pull/30672/.