Mark Rober just set up one of the most interesting self-driving tests of 2025, and he did it by imitating Looney Tunes. The former NASA engineer and current YouTube mad scientist recreated the classic gag where Wile E. Coyote paints a tunnel onto a wall to fool the Road Runner.
Only this time, the test subject wasn’t a cartoon bird… it was a self-driving Tesla Model Y.
The result? A full-speed, 40 MPH impact straight into the wall. Watch the video and tell us what you think!
That’s some Wiley Coyote shit if I ever saw it.
Apparently they keep getting tickets in China because they didn’t bother to adjust the settings to accommodate Chinese roads and traffic laws. Result is Tesla is getting utterly crushed by BYD in their one major market that doesn’t care about Elon’s antics.
I remember Elon foolishly saying his cars don’t need radar or lidar. Even software-disabling radar in cars that already had the hardware.
This is why it’s fucking stupid Tesla removed Lidar sensors and relies on cameras only.
But also who would want a tesla, fuck em
They never had lidarr. They used to have radar and uss but they decided “vision” was good enough. This conveniently occurred when they had supply chain issues during covid.
I was horrified when I learned that the autopilot relies entirely on cameras. Nope, nope, nope.
They also removed radar, which is what allowed them to make all of those “it saw something three vehicles ahead and braked to avoid a pileup that hadn’t even started yet” videos. Removing radar was the single most impactful change Tesla made in regards to FSD, and it’s all because Musk basically decided “people drive fine with just their eyes, so cars should too.”
Is this video being suppressed by the YouTube algorithm? I wonder if it’s because of Tesla or Disney. Or maybe it’s because of simulated child harm?
There’s a very simple solution to this. BUILD MORE TRAINS!
Don’t want to rock the boat but apart from being a you tube money earner this doesn’t prove or disprove anything. A lot of humans would be fooled by this also.
I am suspicious of the way the polystyrene wall broke in cartoon like shagged edges, almost like they were precut.
The point of the test is to demonstrate that vision-only, which Tesla has adopted is inadequate. A car with lidar or radar would have been able to “see” that the car was approaching an obstacle without being fooled by the imagary.
So yes, it seems a bit silly, but the underlying point is legitimate. If the software is fooled by this, then can you ever fully trust it? Especially when sensor systems exist that don’t have this problem at all. Would you want to be a pedestrian in a crosswalk with this car bearing down on you in FSD?
It may not rise to the level of proof, but it is a memorable and easily understood demonstration of something already proven by car safety researchers, as mentioned in the article.
Why shouldn’t they precut the wall into cartoony shapes? It adds entertainment and doesn’t compromise the demonstration.
What would the wall being precut have to do with the car deciding to drive through it?
Nothing much is real anymore on YT
Yes but the main point that has been shown is that putting a screen up with the exact copy of the road and surroundings behind the screen is a daft and dangerous idea. It would be a better test if they had put up a polystyrene tree in the middle of the road and then checked if the car stopped.
I have never driven through a polystyrene wall with a picture of a road on it in 40 years because people just don’t put those things up, they don’t grow on roads etc etc.
Great YT clip for entertainment though.
There’s a very simple solution to autonomous driving vehicles plowing into walls, cars, or people:
Congress will pass a law that makes NOBODY liable – as long as a human wasn’t involved in the decision making process during the incident.
This will be backed by car makers, software providers, and insurance companies, who will lobby hard for it. After all, no SINGLE person or company made the decision to swerve into oncoming traffic. Surely they can’t be held liable. 🤷🏻♂️
Once that happens, Level 4 driving will come standard and likely be the default mode on most cars. Best of luck everyone else!
These same laws will be grandfathered in for ai. This way your health insurance companies computer can murder you by denying care and nobody can be held civilly or criminally liable.
You can’t sue me for my driverless car that drops caltrops, forcing everyone else to take the train.
deleted by creator
I wish all MAGAs a very DEI
Wow you guys even lost the ability to do syntax. I guess it was only a matter of time.
Not only can the right still not meme, it has apparently also lost all ability to recognize meme.
do syntax
Ironic phrase.
Beep beep! Damn things are using ACME LiDAR!
Actually elon demanded that lidar be depricated because of phantom breaking years ago, they only use visible spectrum cameras now
It wasn’t because of phantom braking.
It was to cut costs.It was because covid interrupted supply chains. Same reason they removed lumbar support from passenger seats.
Mark Rober’s video of the six tests (the remaining section is about mapping Space Mountain as Mark wanted to do since he was a kid)
Absolutely hilarious.
Well, I guess we know how to defeat Teslas.
Was there a coyote or a roadrunner anywhere nearby?
Yes, they do feature.
Who was the idiot that removed LiDar to cut costs?
/s
They are so expensive too! /s
Who would have known electronics gets cheaper all the time?? /j
Except GPUs 😥
Elon removed the radar. Tesla cars never had lidar. What an idiot Musk.
Tesla had camera+radar+sonar, and that wasn’t their own tech - they used mobileye EyeQ back then. When they switched to in house tech they gradually ditched the radar and sonar which made no sense to me. But at the time I saw their lead say in an interview that this is superior and I believed. not anymore.
they said doing so cut costs but obviously lidar/radar/sonar only gets cheaper over time, let alone the extra r&d costs because a vision only system is much more difficult to develop.
It was removed because it was giving false positives. They should have upgraded it with lidar but decided to just remove it.
It was removed because of supply chain issues.
Yeah, it might drive straight into a wall but at least it isn’t returning false positives!
He did say lidar was “useless” though.
He’s said humans don’t use LiDAR so his cars shouldn’t have to. Of course humans have a brain, and he’s cars don’t, but you can’t tell him anything.
Human drivers also make automobiles one of the most dangerous ways to travel.
I think it’s also reasonable to say a human dying because of their own actions is different than a human dying because a big corp cut costs on safety features in an entirely autonomous car where the human has no ability to stop what’s happening. (You can control them in current teslas, but they’re working on cars without human controls as well)
He also said the government doesn’t use sql.
Bahaha, what kind of a bizarre statement is that?
Was he trying to imply the government only uses spreadsheets and nosql DBs?
Or did he think it was necessary to point out that your average government employee isn’t writing their own SQL to grab data they need?
Someone said something he didn’t like so he blurted out the first ignorant thing that he thought of, as usual.
