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 […]
I really enjoyed this video, but one thing bugs me a bit. Why does he specifically call attention to Tesla as a brand and not Luminar? If he’s trying to be scientific about the technology, it should be “lidar vs imaging”. Or if he does want to call out brands, “Luminar vs Tesla”. Not that I’m defending Tesla, but this just seems weird to me when his videos are typically more educational.
Are there any other car brands that are relying on only cameras for their assisted driving features?
If you mean like, self-driving then I don’t know. Subaru has lane-assist and adaptive cruise control that uses only cameras though. They use two cameras for binocular vision though so it might not fall for this, I don’t know. Would be a good test.
I probably should have said “only cameras”. Subaru, like the rest, backs the cameras up with radar to avoid situations like in the video.
Edit: welp, apparently not in the front
I think I accidentally deleted my post so sorry if this is a duplicate.
I can poke around in my wife’s outback to verify again, but as far as I’m aware, Subaru doesn’t have any forward radars. Having a set of properly calibrated stereo cameras works amazingly well though. Whatever Tesla is attempting, while still kinda impressive, isn’t nearly as polished with the number of phantom breaking events and stuff like this I see complained about online.
Blind spot I believe is radar, and backward is a combination of sonar and radar if I’m not mistaken.
Well, then it would be interesting to see if Subaru fails these tests too. Especially the visual impairment ones.
If the speed difference between the car and the object is over 32mph (at least for 2018 model year if I’m remembering the number in the manual correctly), I believe it will fail because it doesn’t have enough time to identify the object. It will do it’s damndest to stop, and should be able to scrub off a solid amount of speed, but there will still be some sort of impact just due to pretty clearly spelled out system limitations.
He didn’t even use the Tesla full self driving. He used the ancient autopilot software and even with that he apparently manually disengaged it before impact. Seems pretty disingenuous to me.
Both uses the same sensors. It’s not like Tesla has some hidden better cameras when you use fsd.
My point is that FSD is much, much more advanced piece of software. It’s wrong to label the video self driving when you are not using FSD. Autopilot is just adaptive cruise control that keeps the car in lane.
Autopilot is just adaptive cruise control that keeps the car in lane.
Anyone who watches the video in question knows this statement is misleading. Autopilot also stops when it detects an obstacle in the way (well, it’s supposed to, but the video demonstrates otherwise). Furthermore, decades old adaptive cruise from other brands will stop too because even they have classic radar or laser range-finding.
If even the most basic go no-go + steer operation based on computer vision can’t detect and stop before obstacles, why trust an even more complicated solution? If they don’t back-port some apparent detection upgrade from fsd to the basic case, that demonstrates even further neglect anyway.
The whole point that everyone is dancing around is that Tesla gambled that cheaping out by using only cameras would be fine, but it cannot even match decades-old technology for the basic case.
Did they test it against decades old adaptive cruise? No, that’s been solved, but they did test it against that technology’s next generation, and it ran circles around vision not backed by a human brain.
Autopilot hasn’t received any updates for years. Tesla is only focusing on FSD. This makes your point invalid.
Autopilot hasn’t received any updates for years.
Like I said, demonstrates neglect.
Ok so every car manufacturer is also demonstrating negligence because they can’t even get their updates working in the first place.
Other car manufacturers update their cars all the time. Some OTA, some you have to take in to the service center, but that does not mean they don’t do it. The easy to steal Kias is an example of a recent recall that just required a SW update via service center. My ID.4 just got an OTA update last week. Tesla is showing negligence for not updating a service that is still in a lot of vehicles but they don’t actively sell anymore.
