My boy Danisch is writing about the vehicle, touching upon things that I'm pretty sure I haven't seen in this thread yet. Translation by yours truly,
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Was the vehicle manipulated?
Interesting question. And a thought.
A reader already asked me yesterday why, during the attack on the Christmas market in Magdeburg, the car's airbags didn't get deployed.
I don't know. I don't have much of an idea. As far as I know, the airbags only get deployed above a certain minimum impact severity, so, first, the airbags don't get deployed prematurely and are already used up in the main impact, and secondly, the airbag doesn't cause more damage than the accident itself for smaller accidents that aren't dangerous for the occupants, because the two frontal airbags destroy the console and steering wheel and cause thus a few thousand euros worth of damage, and nowadays there are even more airbags involved. I have seen a photo of the vehicle somewhere in which the windscreen is broken, but the car has otherwise been visibly intact. As a layman I thought that human versus car is simply insufficient to deploy the airbag, and I can't recall either having seen a photo of a mere personal injury accident with a deployed airbag. But I decided not to write anything about it, because I simply know too little about it, and didn't want to start guessing, because it didn't seem necessary to me that the airbag should have been deployed.
Just the opposite: According to the images and videos of the arrest and the statements by the police, the culprit is not significantly injured. So why should the airbag have gotten deployed in the first place, if no impact was strong enough to endanger the driver? For the people at the Christmas market, the impact was dangerous to deadly, but the airbag doesn't help there. So why should it have deployed?
That's why it seemed plausible to me that it didn't deploy, and insufficient to ask questions. Especially since they have the car and it's to be assumed that they're going to deeply examine and inspect every nook and cranny of it. I don't believe either that the car rental company wants to have it back. They'll probably say "keep it and do whatever you think is right with it" and write it off as an insurance case. No company can afford to rent or sell such a car again. That would be a public relations suicide. Especially since a court case can take two, three years and the vehicle as the murder weapon remains confiscated and then taken in.
Doesn't really lend itself to an article.
Now, another reader is writing to me:
This entire thing stinks to high heaven. What follows is my analysis. As of now:
The car is a BMW X3 (Ver. G 45 / 24). This vehicle is equipped with an electronic crash-induced load-shedding system. In the event of a collision, the brakes are automatically engaged within fractions of a second and the engine is disengaged and shut off. Additionally, the front and side airbags get deployed. These car functions can't be deactivated by the user. They can only be adjusted by specialists and require interventions in the vehicle's control systems. The software of the car's central control electronics needs to be reprogrammed, and the hardware components (controllers and sensors) need to be bypassed or modified.
[note: can confirm this is true] Yesterday in the press conference, the police and prosecution of Magdeburg officially said that the time frame of the rampage was three minutes (!!!). Three minutes of rampage with no engine, forced brakes, and with deployed airbags? There is the question of a technically manipulated car.
I still don't agree with the thing about the airbags. Why should they get deployed when it wasn't dangerous for the driver, who did exit completely unharmed? Then they would be used up and would no longer be available for a collision with a vehicle or a wall.
But that such a car is full of electronics and I'm still thinking in terms of 10, 20 year old technology, that's a valid point. If this was a rental car, and not a cheap compact, then the car couldn't have been very old, normally they are in service for a maximum of two, three, four years, so it's safe to assume that they've got modern electronics according to EU regulations.
And it could be that they possess functions that I don't know about yet. I have written that, with rental cars in Cyprus, I was surprised because they had functions I didn't know about yet, such as stick shift cars with a hill holder that don't roll downhill when accelerating on mountains when you hold the clutch and throttle without braking, even though it normally should. Or that brake autonomously when parking before you hit something.
It didn't cross my mind that such a modern car with automatic emergency service call etc. don't just detect harm to the driver, but also collisions with pedestrians and automatically stop the car.
If that was a relatively new and not an old vehicle. But "G45" is allegedly new.
That's an interesting point that wouldn't have crossed my mind. It would be useful to have in a vehicle, especially nowadays as everything is computer-controlled and you no longer steer the vehicle, but you operate the computer and tell it what you'd like to have.
However, I have to admit that, using Google, I didn't find anything on that, so I can't say if this vehicle - or BMW vehicles in general - have such a thing.
But I am sure that the EU is soon going to mandate a Christmas market inhibitor for all vehicles. Or something that the reader describes, that collisions with people get detected and the car immediately stalls and calls the police, to prevent hit and run.
Or, as they have been doing with drones for a long time, the onboard computer has a list of no-go areas as part of the map and blocks the entry. With drones, they have a list of areas in which they don't fly, such as airports, nuclear power plants, prisons, and such areas. So it would be conceivable that such areas are statically or dynamically blocked for car traffic by mandating that the cars must prevent entry in squares, pedestrian areas, and so on, or that the police can set up emitters that send some "no entry here" data so the car refuses. Or visually recognizable signs.
In the year review, [comedian] Dieter Nuhr said that he has a car that, according to EU mandates, always makes warning sounds when he - allegedly - drives too fast, because the car thinks to have seen a 30 kph [20 mph] speed limit sign somewhere. If the car can recognize speed limit signs and raise an alert, then in principle it could also optically recognize special signs and deny entry. So you could design a special no-entry sign, easily recognizable by cars, and put up not just concrete blocks, but also such signs around Christmas market, blocking cars like the cross blocks Count Dracula.
Which, of course, would require that the car no longer drives or only drives in an emergency mode when the camera etc. no longer work properly, such as because of sabotage or impediments etc.
That's it for the article.
Does anyone of you know about that stuff?
If not, I'm in contact with several car mechanics in Germany, I can go ask them tomorrow, they probably deal with BMW cars at least 3 days a week.
