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!
I tried Waymo when I was visiting LA a few months ago. Genuinely terrific stuff.
I do not trust Teslas one bit though.
TIL Mark Rober is a domestic terrorist
Im glad Luigi & Wile are on the same side.
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.
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.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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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 :)
Forget lidar, they don’t have mature tech like radar for emergency braking.
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.
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 😄
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.
Still think LIDAR is inferior to computer vision, Elon?
He never thought about it in the first place.
The war against AI will be fought with Looney Tunes bits.
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
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
This is what happens when you don’t lidar
I would say that it’s a good idea to paint more tunnels on walls, but then I remember how dumb human drivers are too
You’d be horrified how many people drive off a bridge that has collapsed, it’s happened multiple times in multiple different incidents.
The real test starts at 11 minutes and shows frightening problems of the Nazi clown cars.
Youtube mad scientist
Okay come on, Styropyro fits the bill way better for “mad scientist”
Styropyro genuinely has a screw loose, explosions and fire also fits the bill. And he’s Australian.
Aw come on, I thought the lasers versus watermelons demo was a lot of fun, and if that isn’t mad science, I don’t know what is
Don’t get me wrong, I love Mark, but his content is kind of, tailored to the masses, you know what I mean? Fun stuff you can do at home! A mad scientist might do something more insane, such as connect 100 car batteries together to rival the power of lightning…
NurdRage ticks the box for me. Also NileRed before he moved out of a garage lab. Still cool though.
Mark Rober. Why did it have to be Mark Rober.
Why not? Seems fitting an ex NASA engineer show Elon, the man currently trying to dismantle NASA, just what kind of intelligent people exist in that agency.
Yeah, but I just can’t stand his presentation style.
Mark Rober is what you get when you cross veritasium with Mr beast. Someone who’s genuinely smart but they’re going to leave all that stuff out because they want the bigger audience
Mark Rober is what you get when you cross veritasium with Mr beast.
I hate that this makes as much sense as it does.
I don’t know anything about him, what’s wrong with him exactly?
He shouts all the time. My theory is that the shouty style works for younger US audiences.
For a non-American it’s grating AF.
There’s something about his presentation style I just can’t stand. Just the epitome of the “hey what’s up guys” approach.
His target audience is teenagers, so that’s what you get. I think having a guy like him teach kids about LiDAR and stuff in an entertaining way is a win.
But yeah, as a 30 year old I agree he’s a bit too much.
It’s for kids, dude
I think that’s largely because he wants to make his channel as kid-friendly as possible. If you watch some of his real early videos, he has a much calmer, more lecture-like demeanor without all the goofy edits and other modern YouTube tropes.
His other big business venture is a subscription box for kids, which I think it aimed for around 8-13 year olds, so I imagine he’s adopted his current personality to try to appeal to that audience.
I love some of the stuff he does (the hot wheels race is absolute gold), but I agree. He’s only leaned further into the cringe since launching crunch labs.
To be fair, he seems to be targeting kids with his content now. Anything to get kids interested in STEM early is a win in my book.
It’s very modern, cheesy & spoon-feedy. Lots of staging. Overly friendly. Like it is filmed with the approval and oversight of HR.
I know what you mean. He does some amazing things, but I tend to stick to the highlights rather than sit through whole videos. This one, the elephant toothpaste vid, and others like it can be watched as a 15 second clip if you just want to see the hook.
It clearly works for his target audience, so I can respect sticking to the formula.
Yeah, clearly someone is watching, you can’t deny he’s successful.
Pre-cutting the polystyrene to make it collapse in a more cartoony way
