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Comment by dhaavi | Hacker News Reader

This is about (re)liability, rather than features.

Meaning, this is the first stock car you can actually buy where you do not need to hold the wheel anymore when it is self-driving.

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Ford’s BlueCruise and Cadillac’s SuperCruise don’t require hands on the wheel.

The difference, as I understood it, was in this system the driver’s full attention isn’t needed, unlike the systems above.

This is the best explanation:

https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images...

Mercedes explicitly accepts liability while their system is in control, while Ford and Cadillac don't. They say you don't have to hold the wheel, but you are still liable for anything that happens.

Right. They’re driver assist systems, not self-driving systems. So the person in the drivers seat is fully in charge of/responsible for everything.

Unlike Mercedes.

This. It is about the driver actually not being responsible for the system behavior when the car is driving itself. That means Mercedes-Benz bit of the long tails.

Are you suggesting that this system is equally likely to crash into a parked truck as a Tesla? If it is, it would be amazingly reckless to tell people they don't have to look at the road. And extremely bad PR.

And I'm not picking on Tesla in particular. There are lots of level 2 systems that don't reliably detect stationary objects. But nobody suggests relabeling them as level 3.

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