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 love that one of the largest YouTubers is the one that did this. Surely, somebody near our federal government will throw a hissy fit if he hears about this but Mark’s audience is ginormous
Anyone with half a brain could tell you plain cameras is a non-starter. This is nearly a Juicero level blunder. Tesla is not a serious car company nor tech company. If markets were rational it would have been the end for Tesla.
Austin should just pull the permits until all the taxis have lidar installed and tested. Or write a bill that fines the manufacturer $100 billion for any self driving car that kills a person and puts the proceeds 50% to the family and 50% to infrastructure. One of the first rules of robotics was always about not harming humans.
The rain test was far more concerning because it’s much more realistic of a scenario. Both a normal person and the lidar would’ve seen the kid and stopped, but the cameras and image processing just isn’t good enough to make out a person in the rain. That’s bad. The test portrays it as a person in the middle of a straight road, but I don’t see why the same thing wouldn’t happen at a crosswalk or other place where pedestrians are often in the path of a vehicle. If an autonomous system cannot make out pedestrians in the rain reliably, that alone should be enough to prevent these vehicles from being legal.
Who owns the White House right now?
The question there would be does Austin have crosswalks that don’t have red lights. Many places put a light at every cross walk, but not all. Most beaches don’t have them at every crosswalk, they just have laws that if someone is in or entering the crosswalk you have to stop for the pedestrians. (They would all be at risk from what you are saying).
Not every pedestrian follows the rules of the lights though. And not every pedestrian makes it across the road in time before the light changes colors from red to green.
“Wile E Coyote was here”
Hijo de puta
The question is could this fool a human
Also I went and watched the video and he doesn’t seem to even use full self driving for the wall test
As a human who watches the video, I can say no. The wall would not have fooled me.
Are you sure though?
If you knew to expect a wall it is pretty obvious but if you aren’t expecting a wall it might prove confusing.
I probably would stop either way.
But why was there a road there?
This is like the crash on a San Francisco bridge that happened because of a Tesla that went into a tunnel and it wasn’t sure what to do since it went from bright daylight to darkness. In this case the Tesla just suddenly merged lanes and then immediately stopped and caused a multi car pile up.
You’d think they have cameras with higher dynamic range and faster auto exposure in their cars by now. Nope, still penny pinching.
If only elon hadn’t insisted on not using lidar or anything other than just visible light cameras
Mark Rober is about to be listed as FBI public enemy #1 :(
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!
Kids already have experience playing hopscotch, so we can just have them jump between the rooves of moving cars in order to cross the street! It will be so much more efficient, and they can pretend that they are action heroes. The ones who survive will make for great athletes too.
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.
If it’s a feature of a car when you bought it and the insurance company insured the car then anything the car does by design must be covered. The only way an insurance company will get out of this is by making the insured sign a statement that if they use the feature it makes their policy void, the same way they can with rideshare apps if you don’t disclose that you are driving for a rideshare. They also can refuse to insure unless the feature is disabled. I can see in the future insurance companies demanding features be disabled before insuring them. They could say that the giant screens blank or the displayed content be simplified while in motion too.
What is far more likely is that policies simply wont cover accidents due to autonomous systems.
If the risk is that insurance companies won’t pay for accidents and put people on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills, then people won’t use autonomous systems.
This cannot go both ways. Either car makers are legally responsible for their AI systems, or insurance companies are legally responsible to pay for those damages. Somebody has to foot the bill, and if it’s the general public, they will avoid the risk.
Not sure how it plays for Tesla, but for Waymo, their accidents per mile driven are WAY below non-automation. Insurance companies would LOVE to charge a surplus for automated driving insurance while paying out less incidents.
Once that happens, Level 4 driving will come standard
Uhhhh absolutely not. They would abandon it first.
If no one is liable then it’s tempting to deliberately confuse them to crash
deliberately confuse them to crash
Won’t the people doing that be committing attempted murder?
Self driving cars don’t need to have anyone on board
Ask the KIA boys how much they care about murder charges.
To be fair, the roadrunner it was following somehow successfully ran into the painting.
To be fair, I’d be surprised if half the humans driving didn’t do the same.
this. watching the video, I had some trouble telling the difference. sure, from some angles it is obvious, but from others it is not.
That said, other cars, with more types of sensors, would probably have “seen” the obstruction on the road.
I think the human brain hasthe edge in processing visuals since out brains are so much better at adapting than any computer system. We can improvise much better since we have our whole life experience to draw on.
Tesla is trash.
Fuck Elon musk.
To any artists in Austin,TX: you have your work cut out for you. Godspeed.
New Trump-Hitman challenge unlocked
can someone do this to trumps tesla please
Trump will never be in it. His security detail could never allow him to drive in it. Nor would the back seat ever be as comfortable as what he usually drives in so he wouldn’t want to be in it unless it was for press purposes. There’s a reason the Cadillac cost over a million dollars that the presidents usually drive around in.
In silicon valley there is an episode where a bunch of phones explode because of a software problem. A lot like the pager attack trump got a trophy for. And musk could take any of these cars and “self drive” them to where ever, and “update” their discharge parameters or something, then boom. The trucks are 10k lbs too. Bet you could take a small building down with one without much fuss. They are pretty fast. Scary shit. Musk is a huge problem. Watch all gov envoys being his swasticars and then he can take people out russian style. opps, accident, again.
