The van from the vid came years after the two mercedes s cars. I think there was no breaking for obstacles, exiting the highway, or even using interchanges. It was simply holding a lane (maybe change it when told to) and holding a set speed.
Correct me if I am wrong, as I did not read into the experiment.
Not interesting, and frankly, takes away from the dramatic results of recent self-driving cars.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10333126
The had auto-breaking, car detection and lane merging the least.
I think it's safe to say that while this was pioneering work, none of the technology it used was acceptable in terms of safety or generalizability.
I pointed that those functionalities existed and presumably sometimes worked, as opposed to OP that said they did _not_ have them. At the very least, the false positive proves they had emergency breaking.
What I find amazing is what they managed to do with much less powerful HW than what we have today, with much more primitive camera systems. To put it into context, the project is older than I am and they managed to achieve things that most of my live until pretty recently I would have categorized somewhere between amazing and impossible.
My concern is that this article massively overstates the results that Dickmanns had in a way that implies his work had any real chance of being used in a production environment. There is a substantial difference in the sorts of Probabilistic systems that Thrun and others build today.