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!
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.
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.
OMFG someone test to see if Teslas stop to eat free bird seed.
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.
Meep meep!
So many Acme products we need to test, I saw one guy already successfully tested an Olmec statue.
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.
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’s a reason GenX trained on hopper. Too bad the newer generations don’t have something equivalent
TIL Mark Rober is a domestic terrorist
Still think LIDAR is inferior to computer vision, Elon?
He never thought about it in the first place.
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”.
And let me just add, Musk ordered the LIDAR removed against the engineers better judgement.
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
Don’t give him ideas!!!
On the internet, nobody knows you’re just a brain in a
jarcar.
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.
