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!
To be fair, the roadrunner it was following somehow successfully ran into the painting.
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!
There is no way insurance companies would go for that. What is far more likely is that policies simply wont cover accidents due to autonomous systems. Im honeslty surprised they wouls cover them now.
can someone do this to trumps tesla please
Can this be solved with just cameras, or would this need additional hardware? I know they removed LIDAR, but thought that would only be effective short range, and would not be too helpful at 65 km/h.
Theoretically, yes. A human would be smart enough not to drive right into a painted wall, using only their eyeballs combined with their intelligence and sense of self-preservation. A smart enough vision system should be able to do the same.
Using something like LIDAR to directly sense obstacles would a lot more practical and reliable. LIDAR certainly has enough distance (airplanes use it too), though I don’t know about the systems Tesla used specifically.
If for some bizarre reason you would want to stick to cameras only, you could use 2 cameras and calculate the distance to various points based on the difference between the images. Thats called stereoscopy and is precisely what gives our brains depth perception. The issue is that this process is expensive computationally so I’d guess that it would be cheaper to go back to lidar.
Good question. I don’t know if they ll succeed but they have a point that humans do it with just vision so why can’t ai do at least as well? We’ll see. I’m happy someone is trying a different approach. Maybe lidar is necessary, but until someone succeeds we won’t know the best approach, so let’s be happy there’s at least one competing attempt
I gave it a try once and it was pretty amazing, but clearly not ready. Tesla is fantastic at “normal” driving, but the trial gave me a real appreciation how driving is all edge cases. At this point I’m no longer confident that anyone will solve the problem adequately for general use.
Plus there will be accidents. No matter how optimistic you may be, it will never be perfect. Are they ready for the liability and reputation hit? Can any company survive that, even if they are demonstrably better than human?
To any artists in Austin,TX: you have your work cut out for you. Godspeed.
Tesla is trash.
Fuck Elon musk.
It is a very high bar for FSD to force it to deal with intentional sabotage of FSD.
People will definitely fuck with autonomous cars though so you have to plan for it.
TIL Mark Rober is a domestic terrorist
I tried Waymo when I was visiting LA a few months ago. Genuinely terrific stuff.
I do not trust Teslas one bit though.
Tesla doesn’t use lidar for its sensing, living on the prayer that AI will just get good enough soon enough. Absolutely galaxy brained decision.
waymo’s have almost hit me like three times, and if i were slower, they would have. you are part of the problem. those are killing machines.
almost. Human driver would hit you in similar scenarios probably.
Im glad Luigi & Wile are on the same side.
OMFG someone test to see if Teslas stop to eat free bird seed.
Meep meep!
So many Acme products we need to test, I saw one guy already successfully tested an Olmec statue.
Or a badly painted sign that says “Free charging”
Somebody with better animation skills than me make a cartoon where Wile E. Coyote is hunting cybertrucks using his old tricks and every single one of them works in his favor.
I’d buy that for a dollar!
It got fucking wile e coyoted
The scientists in Ireland calling their data set to prevent this exact fucking thing “Coyote” sent me over the moon.
I am a bit disappointed to not see the Tesla crash into a real wall. I feel a bit click baited here.
Also, they prepared the polystyrene wall to break this cartoonishly, but still played on being surprised.
I’m a bit disappointed they painted identical to the actual road. Probably a lot of humans will get fooled by that one. We should send a challenge back: how looney toons can you get? Will something more cartoonish fool it? Will a different landscape fool it? How about drawing an oncoming train?
The purpose of the video is to test a hypothesis, not to total a car.
Mark Rober is a youtuber sure, and some of the stuff he does is to feed the algorithm. But he’s also an engineer, and that involves experimentation and a good dose of science.
Engineers won’t set up tests that intentionally destroy their expensive test equipment if they can conduct an equivalent test non-destructively.
Did anyone seriously expect it to be a real wall with Rober sitting in the driver’s seat?
Apparently, yes.
Is such depressing cynicism fun for you?
Yeah, do YTers not have the money to kill one Tesla?
That seemed like an expensive production, sadly one totaled car couldn’t make it.Should’ve let WhistlinDiesel “test” it.
I saw the video pop up in my Youtube recommended, but didn’t bother watching because I just assumed that any cars tested would be using LIDAR and thus would ignore the fake road just fine. I had no idea Tesla a) was still using basic cameras for this and b) actually had sophisticated enough “self driving” capabilities that this could be tested on them safely.
They are not still using cameras but removed LIDAR and radar from their cars during the chip shortage 2020/21. The story they were telling was “humans don’t have LIDAR but can drive cars as well, so the cars also only need ‘eyes’ like humans”.
Small correction here: they never had LIDAR. Cars with LIDAR have big racks on top with a spinny thing measuring the surroundings. Teslas had radar but removed during the chip shortage (and disabled it on existing cars) and acted like it was an improvement. The radar was used for distance keeping on cars and could actually detect the car in front of the car by bouncing signals off the ground, it was really slick.
That statement of him is not entirely wrong. But we humans have a very powerful bio computer that is perfectly tuned to process those visual inputs in realtime. Until a comparable performance is possible, removing LIDAR is very stupid.
Besides that, in the fog and rain tests a human likely would have killed a kid anyway, and why settle for human limitations when you could be safer?
We absolutely should also have lidar or analogous tech as part of a solution here, even if cameras did manage to get to human level safety.
Humans cannot, in fact, drive cars well. Humans kill tens of thousands of other humans with cars every year in the US alone.
Yup, cameras and humans share various exploits. Self-driving is going to work better than humans once every car has it and communicates with each other, allowing for minimal gaps even at high speeds, once roads are all very standardized and in a database, and-
Wait, that’s trains
Fucking build more electrified high-speed rail and forget tech bros’ shitty promises
I was getting mildly outraged and ready to comment how you were re-deriving the train at first. Well played.
They really had me in the first half, not gonna lie
Trains don’t go from my driveway to my destination exactly when I feel like going there, while carrying all my luggage.
I get that it’s fun to be smug on the Internet, but private vehicles aren’t going away any time soon.
It’s not a binary decision between all cars and no cars. If trains and public transit have enough capacity and convenience to make most trips feasible by them, car infrastructure will no longer have to be added (in fact can be converted into bus and bike lanes) while shortening trip duration (less cars = less jams) and improving safety.
Also, you barely have luggage for most trips. 99% of my trips are made with luggage I can carry to the nearest stop and board the bus with.
Yeah it’s not a binary decision, but trains are almost never the answer for a lot of people. If I’m going less than a couple hours, then I’m driving that distance. If I’m going much further than that, I’m flying. If I need to move a ton of stuff, I’m either taking my car or renting a uhaul. If I’m taking a lot of people, I’m taking my car. Trains never enter the picture unless I’m looking for variety in my mode of transport.
And trains do not shorten the trip duratiion, not without absolutely kneecapping the roads. And over long distances, they’re absolutely slow compared to planes. In the short distance, they’re slow compared to cars.
Depends on where you live. In most of Europe, trains are frequent and direct between city centers.
My parents tend to prefer the car for the 3-hour trip (also 3 hours by train and bus) to Grandma’s when at least 3 people go because it’s cheaper. A higher toll on the highway could change the threshold, and we’d go more comfortably. Politicians can smoothly adjust the number of people for which public transport wins out with taxes and investments. You’re more likely to cling to the car and they’ve accounted for that in their models, maybe making you switch for a specific kind of trip is not worth the investment. There are lots of factors, such as political alignment, culture, wealth distribution, existing infrastructure etc. that make some jurisdictions able to move the threshold faster than others. Still, the majority of people using cars is unsustainable for lots of reasons:
- noise, smoke, particulate matter pollution
- high energy use per unit of distance per person regardless of drivetrain and resulting climate change
- cost of road maintenance
- waste of space for parking, resulting in poor land use and sprawl
- accident fatalities
- unwalkable areas ruin business opportunities, resulting in towns that simply go broke
so there is an obligation to eventually push the threshold in favor of public transit for most trips.
I have a van load of tools to transport most of the trips I make.
So you’ll keep using it. And enjoy narrow but way less jammed streets. Maybe you’ll be incentivized/required to join the self-driving network, but in decades, not years, after positioning markers have been added to every road in the last repaving, while infrastructure funds have been directed towards making the city traversible for non-drivers.
And the really dumb thing is that lots of modern non-selfdriving cars now have lidar sensors to help the humans not crash into things. Musk apparently wants the AI to be working at a disadvantage.
And let me just add, Musk ordered the LIDAR removed against the engineers better judgement.
Did he have lidar removed? I thought it was radar. I didn’t think any Tesla vehicle ever took on the cost of lidar.
This is true. There never was LIDAR.
I’ll add that every other self driving car company has a pretty good safety record, specifically because they do use LIDAR and RADAR so they can see better than humans.
IIRC Musk said it would rely on AI using the footage from all the Teslas and it’s better than LiDAR. That idiot was proven wrong once again.
They tested a LiDAR rigged car, and it stopped just like you predicted. As of 2021, Tesla uses only cameras for FSD, and not even radar (which my stupid fine Toyota truck has).
They tested the idea safely by building the wall out of styrofoam, or at least that’s what it looks like when it blows apart :)
Front-facing radar is the bare minimum needed to pass the test given (fake-road wall). Many vehicles use it for adaptive cruise control, and radar is even faster than either cameras or lidar for figuring out the range to an object. 1000 Hz measuring distance to an object is enough to find both the relative velocity and the acceleration of another object. This provides enough time to apply the brakes safely when approaching a vehicle or obstacle
LIDAR is even better, and also more compute intensive and expensive to install.
I think Tesla was very short-sighted in removing radar sensors, certainly. If they hadn’t, they could’ve spent more of their energy on making the FSD cars better instead of just making them sufficiently safe with insufficient sensors
Forget lidar, they don’t even have mature tech like radar for emergency braking. Edit: +even
Why do you think lidar is not mature? It is radar, except it uses light and can get much more resolution than an RF radar. Or was that a joke… That was probably a joke… if it was then nm.
Lidar is mature but its automotive application is not. Radar is basic by now in comparison.
That comment just missed the word ‘even’ - as in they don’t even have radar, and that’s on regular non-self-driving cars, and lidar would be a step above that.
Not a joke, lidar struggles with fog/rain, which radar can handle much better.
As far as I’ve seen, any system would be additive. If it has lidar, it would also have cameras and radar. So that you get the best of all the technologies (e.g cameras are the only only of the three that can follow lane markings)
You know what struggles even more in fog and rain? Camera only systems 😄
And ?most? humans. 😉
Clearly we don’t need lidar!
Direct video link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3htsDyQ
“But humans can do it with their eyes!” - says the man not selling a human brain to go with the optical sensors
“But humans can do it with their eyes!”
That’s the best part, they kinda can’t.
There are videos from before they pulled the sensors of some pretty cool stuff where teslas slammed the breaks before anything visibly happened, based on lidar sensors sensing trouble a couple cars up the road, completely blocked to vision.super cool safety tech, and then they pulled it…
one example here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIcC2ZMePKI
Don’t give him ideas!!!
On the internet, nobody knows you’re just a brain in a
jarcar.Check out moneybags over here who can afford a jar car.
dude is living proof brains are optional
The thing is, yes humans can do it with their eyes. But even with the giant amount of progressing power from the brain they are still not great at it.
So of the ultimate goal is to the minimum/cheapest to be almost as good as human then yes, optical sensors only are enough.
Of the goal is to prevent deaths and significantly reduce the number of accidents compared to then lidar is the best option.
The day I heard that was the day I realized he’s a fucking idiot and I wanted nothing to do with his cars/tech.
Judging by how things have turned out…damn was that a good decision lmao
Absolutely the same timing for me. That was a big, oh that’s his logic?, moment.
I tried watching it and it forces a horrible dubbing over it so I didn’t want to watch it. Apparently only way to chage it is to change my whole youtube account language
for the youtube website interface click on the gear wheel, and you can select the audiotrack you want
