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!
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.
Same goes for Teslas. Just that the human that’s making them a dangerous way to travel is Elon Musk.
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)
Weymo have them beat then. They already have cars that essentially act like taxis and the only control the passenger has is an emergency stop button. But they don’t control the speed they don’t control the steering or anything.
But those systems absolutely do have lidar because in order for them to be widely accepted they don’t need to be a bit safer than humans they need to be a lot safer than humans.
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?
Even then, that’s not really correct. People grab data through sql queries all the time. Mostly because all the front ends are trash.
Someone said something he didn’t like so he blurted out the first ignorant thing that he thought of, as usual.