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!
Yep, I could see someone placing a billboard like that with a cliff behind 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?
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.
Suddenly, there are more Yellow Brick Road murals everywhere.
A building owner would not want cars crashing into their property though. Why would they get a mural to intentionally deceive a robot car?
+1…a classic!
Meep meep.
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.
If markets were rational, CEO compensation would never have grown so high, and there’d be no billionaires either.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
A fitting metaphor for Musky and their involvement with the US government.
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
Yeah, pulling radar from the cars was the beginning of the end. Early teslas had radar, and that was what led to all of the “car sees something three vehicles ahead and brakes to avoid a pileup that hasn’t even started yet” type of collision avoidance videos. First, pulling radar was a cost cutting thing. Then Elon demanded that they pull out the lidar too, and that’s when their crash numbers skyrocketed.
But why was there a road there?
He also painted the line leading up to it, if I remember the gag correctly. The real road is off camera.
Taking a guess here, but I think Mark Rober is not a big trump/musk fan? :D
He is studiously apolitical, the only political comment I could find from him was the very sensible advice that we need to tone down our hyperpartisanship :)
https://x.com/MarkRober/status/1641487680168153089?lang=en
For me, I criticize any vehicle that is objectively crappy… and some vehicles where I find them subjectively crappy… and I hope folks don’t assume I’m doing that because of my political leanings.
The story of the disney thing as a reason for why to make a Lidar video, is a great “cover your ass” move.
No one will accuse him of doing it to hit Elmo’s self driving taxi ambitions. but the timing is telling.
he could have made the video at any time, he chose to do it now.
“Wile E Coyote was here”
Hijo de puta
Mark Rober is about to be listed as FBI public enemy #1 :(
EPA is going to investigate him for criminal fraud on Monday, I reckon.
Didn’t they dismantle them on Thursday?
