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 seem to recall that fElon prevented the self driving team from utilizing LIDAR for any part of the system, instead demanding that everything run off of optical input. Does anyone else remember the same?
Was just thinking this
A single LiDAR sensor prevents this kind of issue
I’m trying to find an article that covers what I remember but I know for sure that it’s been a good while since I saw the info I recall. Hopefully I can dig something up.
That might actually be the exact article I’m thinking about. Thanks!
What’s cool is that Teslas used to have radar sensors, at least, but Elon removed them from production to save money. Even if you have a car from back then, the software no longer uses them and they’ll just physically unplug them the next time you have the car serviced, as it’s just a drain on the battery at this point 🙃
meanwhile our subaru has lidar for adaptive cruise control and emergency braking
Yikes.
they’ll just physically unplug them the next time you have the car serviced
So, (looks at watch), in an hour?
So did they unplug it
Iirc they were using a combination of lidar and radar, but Elmo wanted to cut costs.
Funny thing is, the price of lidar is dropping like a stone; they are projected to be sub-$200 per unit soon. The technical consensus seems to be settling in on 2 or 3 lidars per car plus optical sensors, and Chinese EV brands are starting to provide self driving in baseline models, with lidars as part of the standard package.
Ah okay. I was genuinely curious if I was remembering correctly because I definitely know it’s been awhile since I’d read anything on the subject.
I remember there being claims from him or his team about lidar being a dead end that would not scale as well as computer vision.
I believe he claimed that since humans use their vision to drive that computer vision was more than enough.
I don’t know about you, but I also rely on sounds & feel when I drive. I also know that the human eye has evolved to detect motion, filter out extraneous information, and send just the important bits to the brain so that it doesn’t get overloaded with everything the eye sees. Computer vision is the exact opposite from that, having to process every bit of every image the camera sees.
I also know of many times my vision fails. Driving into a sunrise for example
I don’t know about you, but I also rely on sounds & feel when I drive.
Of course. When I feel myself driving into a wall, I stop immediately.
Yep! That’s what I’m thinking of. It was Elmo. The real engineers objected.
Came here to actually write this. Everyone remembers that. He made Tesler the hated shit it is today.
As a space nut I seriously hope that he never gets a chance to do anything similar with SpaceX. Thankfully he’s mostly been kept away from important things thus far.
Don’t get me wrong, I know SpaceX’s closet is overflowing with skeletons. But since Congress has been so kind as to continuously cut NASA’s budget for the last few decades, I have to rely on SpaceX and other private companies to keep our space endeavors going.
I’m (was) huge SpaceX nerd, but last year or so I’m less and less. He always was dumb narcissist asshole, but now I can’t take it anymore. Also the idea that we’ve fucked up this planet and need to move somewhere else, by doing thousands of launches finishing this planet always made me sick. If someone would take him out, I probably would come back to liking the company.
Yes, I recall at the time experts saying it was a terrible mistake and Elon saying Machine learning will bridge the gap.
The real reason was to increase margins.
Is that just to cover his ass cuz he was promising backwards-compatible FSD for models that don’t have LIDAR?
I’m so glad I wasn’t the only person who immediately thought “This is some Wile E. Coyote shit.”
I mean, it is also referenced in the article and even in the summary from OP.
And extensively in the video too.
The actual wall is way more convincing though.
still, this should be something the car ought to take into account. What if there’s a glass in the way?
That might have been an even „simpler“ test.
Yes, but Styrofoam probably damages the car less than shards of glass.
Glass would be very interesting, might actually confuse lidar also.
As much as i want to hate on tesla, seeing this, it hardly seems like a fair test.
From the perspective of the car, it’s almost perfectly lined up with the background. it’s a very realistic painting, and any AI that is trained on image data would obviously struggle with this. AI doesn’t have that human component that allows us to infer information based on context. We can see the boarders and know that they dont fit. They shouldn’t be there, so even if the painting is perfectly lines up and looks photo realistic, we can know something is up because its got edges and a frame holding it up.
This test, in the context of the title of this article, relies on a fairly dumb pretense that:
- Computers think like humans
- This is a realistic situation that a human driver would find themselves in (or that realistic paintings of very specific roads exist in nature)
- There is no chance this could be trained out of them. (If it mattered enough to do so)
This doesnt just affect teslas. This affects any car that uses AI assistance for driving.
Having said all that… fuck elon musk and fuck his stupid cars.
This doesnt just affect teslas. This affects any car that uses AI assistance for driving.
Except for, you know… cars that don’t solely rely on optical input and have LiDAR for example
Fair point. But it doesn’t address the other things i said, really.
But i suppose,based on already getting downvoted, that I’ve got a bad take, either that or people who are downvoting me dont understand i can hate tesla and elon, think their cars are shit and still see that tests like this can be nuanced. The attitude that paints with a broad brush is the type of attitude that got trump elected…
No, it’s just a bad take. Every other manufacturer of self driving vehicles (even partial self driving, like automatic braking) uses LiDAR because it solves a whole host of problems like this. Only Tesla doesn’t, because Elon thinks he’s a big brain genius. There have been plenty of real world accidents with less cartoonish circumstances involving Teslas that also would have been avoided if they just had LiDAR sensors. Mark just chose an especially flashy way to illustrate the problem. Sometimes flashy is the best way to get a point across.
based on already getting downvoted
In this case, yes, but in general, downvotes just mean your take is unpopular. The downvotes could be from people who don’t like Tesla and see any defense of Tesla as worthy of downvotes.
So good on you for making the point that you believe in. It’s good to try to understand why something you wrote was downvoted instead of just knee-jerk assuming that it’s because it’s a “bad take.”
I agree that this just isn’t a realistic problem, and that there are way more problems with Tesla’s that are much more realistic.
Tell that to the guy who lost his head when his Tesla thought a reflective semi truck was the sky
This is a very good test, and the car should have past. That said though, I hate the click bait format where they show a stupidly obvious cartoonish wall, when the real wall is way more convincing.
The Video:
That sort of clickbait is 100% sure to get a “do not recommend channel” from me, I’m so sick of it. And it’s sad when the video has such a good point.
The Clickbait
I can see it’s kind of funny, but it’s misleading.
YouTubers - especially large channels like this - constantly A/B test with different thumbnails and stick with whatever one drives the most traffic (no pun intended) to the video.
You might not like it, but it’s unfortunately the reality of operating a content creation business on an algorithm-driven platform.
There are plenty of channels I follow that make fantastic videos, but sometimes you have to tolerate the shitty thumbnails because that’s just the reality of the system they’re operating within.
Yeah, that is just how youtube works. You as an individual can say you don’t like annoying thumbnails and titles, but they 100% work. And channels that don’t use them are just not getting as many viewers.
algorithm-driven platform
And what is this “algorithm” based on? Actual user behavior. So the way to correct an algorithm is to change actual user behavior, no?
Lemme know when they release an OTA for our parietal lobes.
Have you heard of DeArrow? https://dearrow.ajay.app/
It’s a browser extension that replaces clickbait thumbnails with good community sourced ones
Still supports a creator pulling clickbait.
The only way is to vote with views/retention.But it only supports them if their video is then also good. I don’t like clickbait, because I don’t want to be tricked into my monkey brain looking at something. I do want to see good videos.
Just yesterday the algorithm found some guy doing tech videos. I watched a few of them and then sent a text to a friend who I thought would like it. He asked for a link so I pulled the guys channel up on my phone, and holy smokes, clickbait. If I hadn’t seen the videos already I wouldn’t have given that guy the time of day. But they are well thought out, interesting videos.
I’m not here to correct the world’s poor behaviour. I’m here to watch good videos. De-arrow does a good job of that, it’s quite interesting to see YouTube on a computer without it vs what I’m used to now.
Blame the youtube algorithm and Mr Beast, not all the other youtubers caught up in the tidal wave.
Yeah they do it because it works. I’ve seen several who make otherwise good content talk about it in their videos and make comments about how stupid it is bit they basically have to to be competitive.
I don’t see a problem with thumbnails that accurately portray the contents of the video, since only a small number of characters can fit in the title, so it can be difficult to get a sense for the video at a glance otherwise. I do get really annoyed with thumbnails that are deceptive in any way. For example, pointing out something that is only touched on at the end of a 20 minute video, or worse yet, falsely advertises what’s in the video. If the thumbnail seems like it might be deceptive, I’ll usually read the comments before watching the video, or quickly scroll through it to see if it’s BS or not.
yeah but if you share it with people, they’ll still see the clickbait thumbnail, and that’s the actual problem
Thanks no I hadn’t. Is that available as a Firefox extension. I do most of my browsing on desktop.
The link is right there, you could’ve just clicked it instead of taking the time to write this question?!
Bullshit. It’s in a comment that I didn’t see, because it wasn’t there when I read the thread, and it wasn’t a response directed at me. So how would I know that?
You are just being contrary because you disagree with me, so everything I do is wrong in your eyes.
I bet you view the whole situation in a similar way. As most here do for some reason.
Yes, but you could have just clicked the link to find that out
The link in a comment that wasn’t for me? Like I update every 10 minutes to read all the comments??
Get real will you.Imagine being in the middle of a friendly conversation where you ask a question and the person says, “Why are you asking me?? Just google it.”
Well, this is a forum, not an out-loud discussion, so those are 2 completely different scenarios
They were also already given the link, so I guess:
Imagine being in the middle of a friendly conversation where someone asks for something, you give it to them, and then they proceed to ask questions about it that could be answered by looking at the thing you gave them
I’m not the OP, so I wasn’t having a conversation with them. But to me it gives off the vibe of “Random stranger, you should do all the work for me and provide all the answers, because I’m too lazy to do any of it myself.”
Could just be me though 🤷
At this point everyone should know that YouTube thumbnails have no requirement for accuracy. It’s more like an album cover.
I disagree with this being a good test. Where on earth would you find a wall on a road with a fotorealistic continuation of the road printed on it? This would trick many human drivers. Self driving cars fail in many realistic situations that are a lot more concerning. This is just clickbait.
True, but Mark’s video basically about comparing Tesla’s Camera Sensors Vs Self Driving car with a Lidar Sensor.
They also simulated some real life scenarios which the car with Lidar sensors passed easily, while Tesla failed some of them.
So I guess Lidar sensors are superior compared to Teslas cameras.
Where on earth would you find a wall on a road with a fotorealistic continuation of the road printed on it?
Spoken like a man who has never relentlessly pursued a roadrunner, nor taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque.
You haven’t seen what Teslas are in the news for lately?
It’s not that crazy someone would put up a fake wall on some backroad to catch out inattentive Tesla drivers. Doesn’t even need to be nearly as big and elaborate as this one. Any painted object would accomplish the same.
But the point of the video is that optical cameras are easily deceived, and Elon is lying to his customers that LiDAR is overrated and not necessary.
Doesn’t address the point that humans would be equally deceived by this wall if they don’t pay 100% attention.
I’d hit that
This YT channel definitely went all out on the cartoonish nature of this particular test, but the article describes other tests as well including running over mannequins representing children that other cars (Lexus) avoided.
I actually agree, it’s not really a good test. That wall is very realistic. It’s just that people get pissed about negativity.
You realize Mark Robers target audience is like 8 years old, right? He also references looney tunes and wile e coyote a couple dozen times, including in this thumbnail you’re losing your mind over. The thumbnail fits the theme very well if you ask me.
This video isn’t a rigorous scientific test. This is a children’s video designed to get them interested in the scientific method. Get over yourself.
Why would children be interested in car safety?
Still astounded people use anything other than the subscription section on YouTube.
But we OWNED AND SLAMMED Tesla!
I read something a while back from a guy while wearing a T-shirt with a stop sign on it, a couple robotaxies stopped in front of him. It got me thinking you could cause some chaos walking around with a speed limit 65 shirt.
I think one of my favorite examples was using simple salt to trap them within the confines of white lines that they didn’t think they could cross over. I really appreciate the imagery of using salt circles to entrap the robotic demons …
Teslas did this in the past. There was also the issue of thinking that the moon was a red light or something.
Or when a truck is moving traffic lights
That’s almost as bad as Sidewinder missiles locking onto the sun.
They’re not reading speed limit signs; they’ll follow the speed limit noted on the reference maps, like what you see in the app on your phone.
There’s a lot of cars that check via camera too to double check, for missing/outdated information and for temporary speed limit signs.
Lots of places also have variable limit signs that get updated based on traffic, accidents etc.
Here in NZ those seem to all be marked on the speed limit maps as 100km/h even if in some places the signs never go above 80.
Ngauranga Gorge is one such location and I believe has the country’s highest grossing speed camera.
Where I live there are a lot of “temporary” 30km/h speed limits that were never removed by the road workers after the work was completed.
Yikes, there’s a 25 around here that shows up as a 55 in Google Maps.
Also a 55 that goes down to I think 35 for just a moment when it joins up with a side road. I wonder what a Tesla would do if it was following that data.
And that’s what you get for cheaping out on tech and going with cameras over lidar. Not only that, but Tesla removed all the radar technology that literally every car uses for collision detection about a year ago.
Who was the idiot that removed LiDar to cut costs?
/s
Elon removed the radar. Tesla cars never had lidar. What an idiot Musk.
It was removed because it was giving false positives. They should have upgraded it with lidar but decided to just remove it.
He did say lidar was “useless” though.
Entire video is worth watching. He also snuck a chest mounted lidar into Disney and mapped some rides.
Was there a coyote or a roadrunner anywhere nearby?
Yes, they do feature.
You all keep calling it wrong. It’s pronounced Tesler.
I wish all MAGAs a very DEI
Painted walls, the natural enemy of the Tesla.
They obviously pre-cut the wall, probably for safety reasons, and they were like, let’s make it a silly cartoon impact hole while we’re at it.
Good job.
You think you’re reliably going to notice this after a hundred miles of driving? (X) doubt.
Dude.
You could at least look at what you’re replying to before jumping in and going full outrage mode. I didn’t even say anything about what I thought of the validity of that experiment.
Keep putting yourself forward to defend the poor, misjudged car company belonging to a crazy asshole.
👌👍
Easy
A genius :-)
