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!
“But humans can do it with their eyes!” - says the man not selling a human brain to go with the optical sensors
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
Pretty sure that wasn’t even lidar. It was radar which is even cheaper and pretty much every other new car has if they don’t have lidar.
The thing is, RADAR can see things humans can’t. There was a whole article a while back about a Model X that avoided an otherwise unavoidable accident by bouncing radar under the car in front of it and seeing that car slam on the brakes.
I will point out that if you (or your camera-only driver assist) can’t stop without hitting the car in front of you when they slam on the breaks, then you’re driving too close to them… You really shouldn’t ever put yourself in a position where the person in front of you could cause you to unavoidably hit them.
That said… Yeah, radar/lidar are far better than camera alone and there’s no good reason not to include them in the sensor suite unless you value profits over lives.
And I will point out that if the car in front of you isn’t paying attention and rams a stopped car in the middle of the road, you are fucked no matter what.
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.
Please don’t vandalize their JarCar it has my mom’s brain tissue in it.
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.
Very interesting!
What’s the payoff period, I wonder, assuming everyone could afford optical only before everyone could afford better tech.