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Comment by karlkloss | Hacker News Reader

BMW says it wasn't a self-driving car: https://www.focus.de/panorama/welt/b28-im-kreis-reutlingen-s...

Though censored in some news reports, the vehicle has stickers with the text www.bmw.com/autonomousdriving. Apparently an autonomous driving test vehicle, although it is unclear whether autonomous driving was active at the time.

https://twitter.com/AEONde/status/1559477911446589441

One BMW spokesperson said: "We are currently investigating the exact circumstances. Naturally, we are in close contact with the authorities. One thing is already clear: The BMW vehicle involved was not an autonomous driving vehicle."

Maybe it was a vehicle with additional equipment for collection data/imagery that was still completely driven by a human driver. That would explain the stickers.

Interesting. Why would the german media censor the car brand? Arent consumers meant to know which one flopped this badly?

I doubt there is any censorship wrt that as you can see in the photo that the electric car involved is obviously a black BMW i3.

Probably for the exact reason that your comment substantiates: we have little to no reason at all to suspect the car flopped.

That still doesn’t mean the company needs to be censored? The media doesn’t answer to BMW shareholders.

My understanding is that in most of the civilized world (not in the US), the norm for media is not to report defaming information before its veracity has been established.

It’s a good thing when media shows some restraint not to make unsubstantiated claims that are impossible to fully retract in the public consciousness.

Note: This doesn’t mean media shouldn’t report on anything short of a conviction, but it probably shouldn’t report in a defaming way on something that may not even be reportable news at all (i.e. an ordinary fatal car crash)

I’m sorry, but you’re blowing this out of proportion.

Wanting the media to include the brand of the car involved in the crash (totally normal thing to do), is not equivalent to avoiding names of murder suspects. The brand is a fact, regardless of whether the self driving nature caused the crash.

The way facts are framed can make them dangerous nonetheless. Just because something is a fact doesn’t mean reporting it is harmless.

> The media doesn’t answer to BMW shareholders.

Oh but it does. Corruption is alive and well and often so are the laws to facilitate it.

Why would German media living of BMW ads censor BMW autonomous car accident details? Hmm, that's tough one...

If you read carefully, they are talking about the difference in responsiblity between level 2 and level 3 autonomous driving, with the explicit remark that the driver is fully responsible in a level 2 vehicle and that the vehicle in question is level 2, not level 3. They fully avoid saying whether the autonomous driving was active at the time of the accident or had anything to do with it. It really reads like something has gone wrong and they want to avoid bad publicity and shift the blame on the driver by tiptoeing around the real issue of whether their autonomous driving software caused the accident. Instead they are trying to redefine the general notion of "autonomous" to mean "level 3" which their vehicle isn't.

Translation of the part of the article I'm talking about: BMW said on tuesday: "The car has a driver assistance system of level 2, which are even today shipped in normal consumer vehicles and which support the driver if they so desire. With level 2 vehicles, the driver is generally always responsible." Only with highly automated vehicles of level 3, the driver may, under certain circumstances, delegate driving fully to the vehicle.

BMW said: "At the moment we are researching the exact circumstances. Of course we are in a close exchange with the authorities. But it is already certain: The BMW involved was not an autonomously driving vehicle".

BMW also said it wasnt involved in dieselgate.

It shouldn't come as a shock, since self-driving cars currently do not exist - not even in the prototype stage.

Actually, they are existing in prototype stage.

EDIT: They exists since the 1970s on closed tracks. I remember during my work in 1990s at DASA (Daimler Chrysler Areo Space) they had them on the airfield in Friedrichshafen.

By that standard, my cat is a truck driver because she can ride the Roomba.

You can go out and pay to ride in a self driving car right now

You can buy a ride on the Bezos Vomit Comet up to the Kármán line, but that does not make you a martian - or that contraption an orbital rocket.

There is no self-driving car in existence today that can do what most people understand by driving. Waymo is just a simulation of what a self driving car should do, achieved by painstakingly mapping every square inch of street in a very limited area. It's a ruse achieved by brute-forcing, not self-driving. Not even their makers trust it to be self driving, assigning back-up human drivers in unpredictable service areas.

My apologies, I wasn't aware we had different definitions of driving.

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