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Comment by LegitShady | Hacker News Reader

>A Cruise AV named Panini

This sort of nonsense where you take a serious statement and tell me the cutesy "name" of the autonomous vehicle really detracts from the seriousness of the issue. Also, the last paragraph where they try to talk about how their vehicle wouldn't have made the same mistake as the human driver, glosses over the actual issues the cruise car had which a human driver would have known not to do.

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I had the same thought about the name. They also didn't refer to the name again in the rest of the article, so it wasn't even setting up a convenient name to refer to the vehicle and distinguish it from other AVs; it was entirely superfluous.

Ya, and since a Panini is a pressed sandwich, you'd think the PR people would immediately remove that since it's comparable to what the car did to the woman's leg.

"Cruise gives the cars cutesy names" is typical of fast turnaround journalism. The reporter doesn't have the time or resources to investigate the details to determine if this is indicative of a casual culture at Cruise. Instead, they can drop the easily verified vehicle name and let the readers fill-in-the-gaps. It doesn't exactly line up with CA DMV suspending the AV permit, but it adds so-called depth to the story.

I wouldn't expect this offhanded fact in long-form, slower journalism. But I expect this from Reuters.

I didn't get it from "Fast turnaround journalism", I got it from Cruise's official statement, which was linked in the post I replied to.

So basically nothing you said is relevant.

That's a press release.

Why is anyone paying attention to it?

In their original press release they didn't even mention dragging the pedestrian. Here they've only mentioned it because they were caught red handed by the DMV.

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