At Daimler, I worked on the computer vision system, doubling the throughput (by adding more processing nodes primarily). IIRC, we went from ~12.5 Hz to about 25Hz. That was fairly straightforward, but I also added a lot of inter-frame aware filtering, created some graphical output changes to help us better understand what the system was doing internally at any given time. That was all in Occam on transputers. I think each card held two nodes and cost about $25K. Each node was about a 486-25.
We had a couple mile stretch of abandoned Autobahn a few miles away from our lab building that we would test on about once a week. (Other teams also needed the vehicle to test their systems.) We also took it to an abandoned airfield outside Munich for longer, higher-speed tests, and demos, and took it to Turin a few times for tests and pan-PROMETHEUS demos and world record runs. On a few of those test sessions, if our system was working well, I was also able to pitch in with other teams on control system algorithms, a radar ranging system, and lane/sign detection vision system work.
(This is all 23+ years old, so forgive some minor discrepancies.) It was a great experience all around! (You also got me to send a LinkedIn invite to my boss there, Dr Andreas Kuehnle, now at Bendix, so thanks for the followup Qs.)
When I came back and graduated, I interviewed at the US Big 3 (back when there were 3, they were big, and US... :) ) and a Ford engineer urged me to "go anyplace other than US auto". He said if I wanted to come back into motorsports or high-perf/speciality street vehicles that I was better off doing something else for 5 years and applying back directly into those units. I wish I had that guy's name and address as it was great advice.
Went to a few startups that failed, went to a motorsports simulation game company that was successful and bought by Sierra-Online, then went to a satellite office of DEShaw (a hedge fund), bounced around in finance, and finally ended up at Vistaprint a few years before we went public in 2005 and I'm still there and crazy happy.
I welcome any followup questions (for HN sake, followups on your former question are more interesting than the latter, but I'll answer either...)