The Tesla (not a fanboy btw) is miles ahead in this regard.
To anyone reading this comment: please buy used and understand that most problems with cars can be fixed economically by someone with a bit of knowledge.
you're making a lot of assumptions here. In general I'd agree with you.
Could that be deliberate to keep the driver attentive? I have a Honda with similar functionality, and it will just completely disengage if the driver hasn't adjusted the steering in 15-20 seconds. It also has automatic emergency breaking that deliberately will not prevent a collision, it will only slow you down. The effect of their decisions is that long distance driving is easier, but it's impossible to even try to let the car drive itself.
So ... no secret at all and widely published and discussed?
So yes, the same. No secret, published and discussed while nothing really done.
Dieselgate has a 25,000 word Wikipedia article with almost 500 citations. What secrets are being guarded?
The author acknowledges having read that information, yet for some reason concludes that BWM is deliberately trying to mislead the public. The reason for that leap of logic is not obvious to me.
I honestly have no idea, but I'm becoming less surprised as time goes on.
The car is not equipped for higher automation levels, which require a much bigger sensor set. You'd be able to see them. It has a bog standard assistance set.
The friggin' stickers are for GDPR reasons and they just designed a single sticker that is used all over the test fleet. The claim "automated" is the same hybris all over the industry, managers trying to compete on claims. It does say nothimg about the capabilities of BMW in the field.
"It is normal that cars like that one can be used by the developers even off-hours. Typically you have to write a short test report after the weekend and ingest the recorded drives. That extends the spread of tested scenarios."
That is absolutely true and BMW camouflaged cars with stickers, like the ones described in the article, are a very, very common sight in and around Munich. I'd say in the northern parts of the city and the Autobahn leading northward you are bound to see one if you just wait a short while. This also means that naturally they are involved in accidents and occasionally even in fatal ones.
Despite that these cars are common and there are a ton of people driving them, every single person moving one of these cars has had very thorough training. BMW has a whole bouquet of internal drivers licenses with increasing difficulty. It is normal that even people working in software have the basic levels of BMW driving licenses if there is the chance that the they have to use a "test vehicle" (which again there are different classes of).
That said, if I understand correctly, the accident the (pretty nonsensical) article refers to wasn't caused by autosteering. A human was steering the car at the time.
