[dekhn]

They had emergency braking... which just means applying the brakes. If you false positive emergency brake, that's worse than doing nothing (increased risk of crash, integrated over a wide range of possibilities).

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.