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!
Very surprised Mark isn’t… Super supportive of musk and Tesla.
He owns a Tesla and is rather wealthy at this point. Not to mention that he’s Mormon. I’d expect him to be very conservative and all in on the grift.
According to Ol’ Elon the robo-taxi service has been a couple months away since 2017 or so. I can’t imagine it’s much closer now than then.
They should just program it to drive through the painted tunnel but when another driver comes behind you they crash into it.
All these years, I always thought all self driving cars used LiDAR or something to see in 3D/through fog. How was this allowed on the roads for so long?
They originally the model S had front facing radar and ultrasonic sensors all round, the car combined the information to corroborate it’s visual interpretation.
According to reports years ago the radar saved Tesla’s from multiple pileups when it detected crashes multiple cars ahead (that the driver couldn’t see).
Elmo in his infinite ego demanded both the radar and ultrasonics be removed, since he could drive with out that input so the car should be able to… also it is cheaper.I remember reading that tesla only uses cameras for it’s self driving. My 2018 Honda uses radar for the adaptive cruise so the technology exists, musk is just an idiot.
Does it? My 2023 model throws a shit fit if it’s cold and I assume the camera covers are iced over.
It probably has cameras as well, for lane guidance etc.
My Mazda complains if the windscreen is dirty for the same reason.
Our Mazda completely gave up trying during a heavy rain storm one time. Like, gee, thanks, the one time I could use help with knowing where the lines on the road are, and the car just is like, nah, you’re on your own.
Radar would not detect a Styrofoam wall either the return from Styrofoam is extremely low. Radar also can not distinguish elevation differences very well so an overhead road sign can be mistaken for a stopped vehicle or a stopped vehicle mistaken for an overhead road sign.
Radar doesn’t detect stopped objects at high speed. It’d hit the wall too on radar alone.
This has to be solved by vision and or lidar.
Unless your car is traveling faster than the speed of light, radar will detect objects in front of it. But yeah, I was trying to imply that for a complex system like self driving musk is a buffoon for relying on a single system instead of creating a more robust package of sensors.
They get filtered out and the car will not act on it because there is so much noise from stationary objects all around you. The car essentially wouldn’t drive at all if it didn’t filter them out.
At high speeds, the radar in all cars is used to detect moving objects and the change in velocity of those objects.
Radar will not prevent running into this wall at 40mph.
People can downvote me all they want, but that doesn’t change anything.
Only vison and / or lidar would stop for that wall at 40mph.
Edit: aside from clarity on the above this is the expected outcomes
Radar in cars today: hit the wall
Vision: probably all hit the wall but could be sufficiently programmed to not if they trained on it.
Lidar: would not hit the wall.
tesla uses cameras only, i think waymo uses lidar.
They do.
But “all self driving cars” are practically only from waymo.
Level 4 Autonomy is the point at which it’s not required that a human can intercede at any moment, and as such has to be actively paying attention and be sober.
Tesla is not there yet.On the other hand, this is an active attack against the technology.
Mirrors or any super-absorber (possibly vantablack or similar) would fuck up LIDAR. Which is a good reason for diversifying the Sensors.On the other hand I can understand Tesla going “Humans use visible light only, in principle that has to be sufficient for a self driving car as well”, because, in principle I agree. In practice… well, while this seems much more click-bait than an actual issue for a self-driving taxi, diversifying your Input chain makes a lot of sense in my book. On the other hand, if it would cost me 20k more down the road, and Cameras would reach the same safety, I’d be a bit pissed.
Money.
they generally do
Honestly all the fails with the kid dummy were a way bigger deal than the wall test. The kid ones will happen a hundred times more than the wall scenario.
Some sort of radar or lidar should 100% be required on autonomous cars.
I fully agree, but sadly, investors likely care more about their cars hitting walls than hitting kids. Killing a kid or pedestrian in the US is often a very cheap fine. When my uncle was run over on a sidewalk next to his son, the police ruled it an accident and the city refused to do anything. Same thing happened when my friend was ran over in a bike lane… So killing humans is probably cheaper than hitting a wall.
Interesting that in the most consumerist nation on earth, objects have more value than people.
I think insurances will require that is it comes to self driving at least here in Europe.
EU leading the world in consumer protection laws yet again
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!
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.
One of the first rules of robotics was always about not harming humans.
If markets were rational, CEO compensation would never have grown so high, and there’d be no billionaires either.
Notably, roomba vacuum cleaners use cameras instead of lidar that other robot vacuums use. I bought a high end roomba a couple months ago and it was crap at navigating my home, while my old xiaomi with a lidar works perfectly fine. Needless to say i returned the roomba.
Elon Musk: Meep, meep
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.
I didn’t say anything about whether it was adequate. The fact is it is going live. Trying to find weak spots and dangerous areas and point them out to people is all we can do at this stage.
I don’t know the answer to your question, but I’ll add that I’ve seen major cities that have overhead yellow flashing light boxes that mean “you must stop if there is a pedestrian crossing the road”
That should at least slow them down, but yeah it could be a real threat there as well.
Yes, there are mid-block crosswalks in some of the walkable parts of Austin. There are also roundabouts with yield signs and crosswalks and no lights.
That will cause huge issues possibly. Do you live near there? We need to get this information to the public in those areas. Even if it is raining. Do not cross without checking over and over. We need to ban them from being there, but we need to protect the people first. 1 life may overturn the law, but 1 life shouldn’t be lost. It’s better we figure out an alternative
+1…a classic!
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
Honestly I think Mark should be more scared of Disney coming after him for mapping out their space mountain ride.
He probably just made Disney admissions and security even more annoying for everyone else.
Judging by the fact that he has an imagineer-video out (effectively) at the same time as the space-mountain mapping, I’d expect that Disney was fully aware of what he was doing, and the whole sneaky-thing was just to make it more appealing to viewers.
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.
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
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.
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.
“But humans can do it with their eyes!”
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.
Not if you have the following distance to stop, but point taken: a crash decelerates you faster than breaks can and typical following distances are assuming breaking distance, not hard sudden halts.
So increase your following distance. It also has the benefit that it makes it easier to see what’s ahead of the car in front of you.
There’s pretty much no accident that’s unavoidable (barring someone else plowing into you) if you drive defensively enough (assuming good traction and good breaks, but obviously you should increase your following or decrease your speed to compensate for that as well)
Not if you have the following distance to stop
Maintaining a stopping distance like that is nigh impossible in a dense urban area. You’d be constantly cut off and causing tons of traffic.
Really? I do it pretty frequently without issue…
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
They pulled the RADAR from mine just before I took delivery, unbeknownst to me at the time. I received no sort of notification.
Absolutely the same timing for me. That was a big, oh that’s his logic?, moment.
I’m kinda confident that even RADAR + cameras was good enough, but they started shipping cars without it and even shutting off the RADAR in existing cars.
The main negative about LiDAR is the cost, but that’s quickly going down.
Why did they shut off radar?
They don’t want to install it in the newer cars, and they don’t want to make two software versions I guess. A backup would’ve been great though…
Thank you!
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
Yes, but not possible on mobile
I don’t know if it’s somehow not available to everyone, but I am able to change the audio track on mobile.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He just wants people to buy his junk, and doesn’t care how many people would have to die as collateral damage.
That should tell you just how vastly complicated driving is.
There are plenty of uncomplicated things that humans do poorly, too.
Walking up and down stairs, not that I’d know.
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.
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.
Spinny thing is just when you mount one ontop. It doesn’t have to be. The example in the video appears to use a forward facing cone LIDAR. Presumably in addition to other sensors.
It’s still a spinny thing with a laser in it. That’s fundamentally how lidar works. The outside shell can look however they want it to look.
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.
The child dummy was clearly visible through the water in the rain test. Tesla’s systems just suck.
Also competent drivers generally know to slow down during rain. Hell I was literally taught to drive some roads like its a speedway and even I drop below the speed limit during the rain if visuals are bad enough, especially first rain pulls oils out of the road makes it slippery and may cause hydroplaning.
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.
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. 😉
Lidar is mature but its automotive application is not. Radar is basic by now in comparison.
