Self-Driving Tesla Crashes into Wall Painted to Look Like a Road… Just Months Before Planned Robotaxi Launch
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!
https://fuelarc.com/tech/self-driving-tesla-crashes-into-wall-painted-to-look-like-a-road-less-than-3-months-before-planned-unsupervised-robotaxi-launch/Open linkView original on fedia.io1760
Comments346
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!
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.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.
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.
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.
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)
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".
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.
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:
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.
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.
Im glad Luigi & Wile are on the same side.
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.
The first, in fact.
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.
TIL Mark Rober is a domestic terrorist
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
Still think LIDAR is inferior to computer vision, Elon?
He never thought about it in the first place.
That was never in question, they just went with cameras because they're dirt cheap compared to lidar.
Yes, because cameras are cheaper.
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.
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.
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
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!
There is no way insurance companies would go for that. What is far more likely is that policies simply wont cover accidents due to autonomous systems. Im honeslty surprised they wouls cover them now.
If the risk is that insurance companies won't pay for accidents and put people on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills, then people won't use autonomous systems.
This cannot go both ways. Either car makers are legally responsible for their AI systems, or insurance companies are legally responsible to pay for those damages. Somebody has to foot the bill, and if it's the general public, they will avoid the risk.
I don't know if I believe that people will avoid the risk. Humans are god awful at wrapping
theirour heads around risk. If the system works well enough that it crashes, let's say, once in 100,000 miles, many people will probably find the added convenience to be worth the chance that they might be held liable for a collision.E, I almost forgot that I am stupid too
If it's a feature of a car when you bought it and the insurance company insured the car then anything the car does by design must be covered. The only way an insurance company will get out of this is by making the insured sign a statement that if they use the feature it makes their policy void, the same way they can with rideshare apps if you don't disclose that you are driving for a rideshare. They also can refuse to insure unless the feature is disabled. I can see in the future insurance companies demanding features be disabled before insuring them. They could say that the giant screens blank or the displayed content be simplified while in motion too.
Not sure how it plays for Tesla, but for Waymo, their accidents per mile driven are WAY below non-automation. Insurance companies would LOVE to charge a surplus for automated driving insurance while paying out less incidents.
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
The hell is hopper? You mean frogger?
https://www.bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=30
...so frogger.
Uhhhh absolutely not. They would abandon it first.
If no one is liable then it's tempting to deliberately confuse them to crash
Self driving cars don't need to have anyone on board
Ask the KIA boys how much they care about murder charges.
+1...a classic!
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
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.
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.
They never had lidar, as far as I know.
The video literally shows it having lidar tho.
The lidar car in the video is a modified Lexus prototype (came with radar from factory, modified by a third party, with Lexus branding blacked out and replaced with the third party name)
Afaik at the moment there are no cars in the market that have lidar (waymo is adding lidar to cars that have only radar as stock)
Ah, gotcha, I was only half watching so I misunderstood. Thanks for the clarification.
I think some Chinese ones do (nio?), but definitely not tesla
They never had lidar, in addition to radar they removed the ultrasound sensors for parking, which is stupid because they cost like $2 and for parking they're much better than cameras. Same for the rain sensor. Why use a $1 rain sensor that always works reliably all the time in any visibility when you can do that with cameras and complex algorithms?...
It's been about 7 years of model 3 on the market, maybe 8, and the rain detection still doesn't work reliably. Or the traffic sign recognition (in Europe). My car fortunately still has the ultrasound sensors. Phantom braking is still an issue, too. Thank God for stocks for blinkers and drive/reverse.
I like the car in general, but it has the dumbest fails, things everyone else seems to have figured out.
Other cars also have dumb mistakes, like electric cars with no frunk. Literally bolted down hoods. Looking at you, German auto industry...
To be fair, the roadrunner it was following somehow successfully ran into the painting.
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.
You'd be horrified how many people drive off a bridge that has collapsed, it's happened multiple times in multiple different incidents.
I'd be horrified that physical barriers with bright reflectors weren't put up before the bridge that was out.
This has typically been seconds after the bridge collapsed, before emergency services could reach the site.
Did you really think someone just demolished a bridge without putting up a sign?
They should just program it to drive through the painted tunnel but when another driver comes behind you they crash into it.
To any artists in Austin,TX: you have your work cut out for you. Godspeed.
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.
The war against AI will be fought with Looney Tunes bits.
"If you're hearing this, you are the MEEP MEEP!"
Hopefully next an anvil lands on musks head
Mark Rober. Why did it have to be Mark Rober.
Why not? Seems fitting an ex NASA engineer show Elon, the man currently trying to dismantle NASA, just what kind of intelligent people exist in that agency.
Yeah, but I just can't stand his presentation style.
Mark Rober is what you get when you cross veritasium with Mr beast. Someone who's genuinely smart but they're going to leave all that stuff out because they want the bigger audience
I hate that this makes as much sense as it does.
I don't know anything about him, what's wrong with him exactly?
There's something about his presentation style I just can't stand. Just the epitome of the "hey what's up guys" approach.
I think that's largely because he wants to make his channel as kid-friendly as possible. If you watch some of his real early videos, he has a much calmer, more lecture-like demeanor without all the goofy edits and other modern YouTube tropes.
His other big business venture is a subscription box for kids, which I think it aimed for around 8-13 year olds, so I imagine he's adopted his current personality to try to appeal to that audience.
It's for kids, dude
I love some of the stuff he does (the hot wheels race is absolute gold), but I agree. He's only leaned further into the cringe since launching crunch labs.
To be fair, he seems to be targeting kids with his content now. Anything to get kids interested in STEM early is a win in my book.
His target audience is teenagers, so that’s what you get. I think having a guy like him teach kids about LiDAR and stuff in an entertaining way is a win.
But yeah, as a 30 year old I agree he’s a bit too much.
It's very modern, cheesy & spoon-feedy. Lots of staging. Overly friendly. Like it is filmed with the approval and oversight of HR.
I know what you mean. He does some amazing things, but I tend to stick to the highlights rather than sit through whole videos. This one, the elephant toothpaste vid, and others like it can be watched as a 15 second clip if you just want to see the hook.
It clearly works for his target audience, so I can respect sticking to the formula.
Yeah, clearly someone is watching, you can't deny he's successful.
The hell is the "hey what's up guys" approach? That not a thing.
He shouts all the time. My theory is that the shouty style works for younger US audiences.
For a non-American it’s grating AF.
It's very shouty, very dumbed down, I can't stand it. There's a few channels like that.
Pre-cutting the polystyrene to make it collapse in a more cartoony way
The real test starts at 11 minutes and shows frightening problems of the Nazi clown cars.
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?
Meep meep.
Tesla doesn't use lidar for its sensing, living on the prayer that AI will just get good enough soon enough. Absolutely galaxy brained decision.
How? Do you just walk into the road without looking or something?
Yeah, I definitely think you're leaving some details out here.
almost. Human driver would hit you in similar scenarios probably.
data > your personal anecdotes. Get real dude.
What are you even on about tin foil. Waymos are on the road - how is this data doctored? You can literally see that it's safer than human driving in this exact environment.
Lmao, you can literally see? So anecdotal evidence? What happened you the data you were just promoting?
Where were you that you had to dodge a Waymo? Were you walking down the middle of the road or something?
We've heard one side of the story, about a very unlikely series of events. I do think that person is leaving out a few details.
No
I'm surrounded by waymos every time I go out and I can tell you that if they "almost hit you" three times then that's very likely a you problem -- and a reason for more waymos, not fewer.
Anecdotally, only once have I been in a situation where I've said, "do better, robot" because I was slightly inconvenienced by it.
By the numbers there are very few waymo incidents compared to human drivers and those include waymos being hit by bicyclists who aren't paying attention.
Uhh, think you could rephrase this so it doesn't sound like you're rooting for the Waymo in any Waymo-bicycle accident?
I'm not rooting for anyone in any collision. Everyone should pay attention and drive responsibly.
Again, based on experience, and the data, if you were exposed to "grievous bodily harm" then it seems like you should change something.
I don't know you so I'm not going to suggest you're making up how you feel about the situation but you definitely don't sound like you're expressing an accurate representation of reality.
I have. I've also been hit by a bicyclist. And a scooter. What's your point?
Based on your interactions so far, I'm guessing you ride a bicycle, ignore stop signs and traffic lights, join in on those dumb bicycle caravans that block busses, and blame pedestrians for not looking both ways before you rocket through a crosswalk.
And, you're mad at anything than entrenches motor vehicles in any way because this is your religion.
Okay come on, Styropyro fits the bill way better for “mad scientist”
Aw come on, I thought the lasers versus watermelons demo was a lot of fun, and if that isn't mad science, I don't know what is
Don't get me wrong, I love Mark, but his content is kind of, tailored to the masses, you know what I mean? Fun stuff you can do at home! A mad scientist might do something more insane, such as connect 100 car batteries together to rival the power of lightning...
NurdRage ticks the box for me. Also NileRed before he moved out of a garage lab. Still cool though.
Yes! Also Photonic Induction, maybe. Big Clive would be hard to label mad, though some of his experiments are in pretty interesting territory.
Big Clive is great for interesting electronics/deathtraps 🙂
Styropyro genuinely has a screw loose, explosions and fire also fits the bill. And he's Australian.
I am a bit disappointed to not see the Tesla crash into a real wall. I feel a bit click baited here.
Also, they prepared the polystyrene wall to break this cartoonishly, but still played on being surprised.
The purpose of the video is to test a hypothesis, not to total a car.
Mark Rober is a youtuber sure, and some of the stuff he does is to feed the algorithm. But he's also an engineer, and that involves experimentation and a good dose of science.
Engineers won't set up tests that intentionally destroy their expensive test equipment if they can conduct an equivalent test non-destructively.
Did anyone seriously expect it to be a real wall with Rober sitting in the driver's seat?
Apparently, yes.
I was expecting they'd rig it with a dummy sitting
The title of this post is "Self-Driving Tesla Crashes into Wall Painted to Look Like a Road… Just Months Before Planned Robotaxi Launch". In order to know that someone was sitting in the car, you have to watch the video.
I’m a bit disappointed they painted identical to the actual road. Probably a lot of humans will get fooled by that one. We should send a challenge back: how looney toons can you get? Will something more cartoonish fool it? Will a different landscape fool it? How about drawing an oncoming train?
Haha, oncoming train? You'd be lucky to avoid a slow-rolling freight train at a clearly lit crossing in a Tesla using FSD.
Case in point:
https://youtu.be/h4f-crzpZ9w?t=11
Is such depressing cynicism fun for you?
Yeah, do YTers not have the money to kill one Tesla?
That seemed like an expensive production, sadly one totaled car couldn't make it.
Should've let WhistlinDiesel "test" it.
For environmental reasons I'm glad they're not just destroying whatever they can afford to
Yes, you are very right.
"Wile E Coyote was here"
Hijo de puta
A building owner would not want cars crashing into their property though. Why would they get a mural to intentionally deceive a robot car?
Because its fucking funny.
And the driver will have to pay to rebuild it anyway
If I had a wall to paint it on, you can bet your ass I'd be doing that shit.
Someone made a mural in Brazil but it was removed for safety.
https://www.jalopnik.com/real-life-wile-e-coyote-drives-fiat-smack-into-paintin-1765745078/
This is what happens when you don't lidar
Tesla is trash.
Fuck Elon musk.
Yep, I could see someone placing a billboard like that with a cliff behind it.
A fitting metaphor for Musky and their involvement with the US government.
To be fair, I'd be surprised if half the humans driving didn't do the same.
this. watching the video, I had some trouble telling the difference. sure, from some angles it is obvious, but from others it is not.
That said, other cars, with more types of sensors, would probably have "seen" the obstruction on the road.
Well yeah, that’s sort of the entire point of the video. He ran the test with a lidar-equipped vehicle, and it saw the wall right away. Hell, a radar-equipped car (like early teslas) probably would have seen the “kid” behind the wall as well. But since Musk has decided that cars should be able to self-drive with only cameras, the newer teslas will just plow straight into the wall without braking.
Oops. Thanks. I had seen a shortened version of the video already, thought this was the same version, but it isn't. The one I saw was just the Tesla plowing through the wall.
I would have liked to see how a more typical car with automatic cruise control /braking functioned. I think they use ultra sonic sensors and would have done better than the Tesla.
I think the human brain hasthe edge in processing visuals since out brains are so much better at adapting than any computer system. We can improvise much better since we have our whole life experience to draw on.
I mean you're watching from a recorded video. I really doubt that it wouldn't be anything but obvious to actual humans eyes. i mean our depth perception alone would tell us something is wrong. You're just not watching this in 3D.
Maybe at 55 or 65 mph on a foggy day. But I doubt any person paying attention isn't seeing the obvious anchors holding the wall up and the incorrect perspective at 40 mph.
That's doing a lot of heavy lifting
You're right. I miss the days when it was just "these damn kids" on their cellphones. Now, more often than not, its a boomer on their cellphone. At the end of the day fuckcars.
Soccer mom yelling at the kids and trying to text at the same time.
Can this be solved with just cameras, or would this need additional hardware? I know they removed LIDAR, but thought that would only be effective short range, and would not be too helpful at 65 km/h.
Teslas never had LIDAR. They did have ultrasonic sensors and radar before they went to the this vision only crap.
Theoretically, yes. A human would be smart enough not to drive right into a painted wall, using only their eyeballs combined with their intelligence and sense of self-preservation. A smart enough vision system should be able to do the same.
Using something like LIDAR to directly sense obstacles would a lot more practical and reliable. LIDAR certainly has enough distance (airplanes use it too), though I don't know about the systems Tesla used specifically.
As I understand it, this is uncommon and mostly used for topological mapping.
Most commercial aircraft use a radar, augmented with a GPS-based terrain map, for their ground proximity warning (EGPWS, “Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System”).
I could be wrong though, I’m not a pilot.
If for some bizarre reason you would want to stick to cameras only, you could use 2 cameras and calculate the distance to various points based on the difference between the images. Thats called stereoscopy and is precisely what gives our brains depth perception. The issue is that this process is expensive computationally so I'd guess that it would be cheaper to go back to lidar.
Subaru does that!
Theoretically yes, but in reality, not with current technology.
LIDAR actually has quite a long range. You can look up some of the images LIDAR creates, they're pretty comprehensive.
Good question. I don’t know if they ll succeed but they have a point that humans do it with just vision so why can’t ai do at least as well? We’ll see. I’m happy someone is trying a different approach. Maybe lidar is necessary, but until someone succeeds we won’t know the best approach, so let’s be happy there’s at least one competing attempt
I gave it a try once and it was pretty amazing, but clearly not ready. Tesla is fantastic at “normal” driving, but the trial gave me a real appreciation how driving is all edge cases. At this point I’m no longer confident that anyone will solve the problem adequately for general use.
Plus there will be accidents. No matter how optimistic you may be, it will never be perfect. Are they ready for the liability and reputation hit? Can any company survive that, even if they are demonstrably better than human?
It works pretty well as a highway assist. I never use it on city streets because its so slow and hesitant which is worse.
For me the biggest downside was really poor road maintenance: lines worn off, long cracks that could be interpreted as lines, offset intersection where you can’t go straight across and no lines … or at night not enough cleared space so the side camera decides it’s obscured.
I have this one really narrow windy road that too many humans have trouble with. I really wanted to see what it would do but decided there wasn’t enough room for me to take over if I needed to
can someone do this to trumps tesla please
In silicon valley there is an episode where a bunch of phones explode because of a software problem. A lot like the pager attack trump got a trophy for. And musk could take any of these cars and "self drive" them to where ever, and "update" their discharge parameters or something, then boom. The trucks are 10k lbs too. Bet you could take a small building down with one without much fuss. They are pretty fast. Scary shit. Musk is a huge problem. Watch all gov envoys being his swasticars and then he can take people out russian style. opps, accident, again.
Trump will never be in it. His security detail could never allow him to drive in it. Nor would the back seat ever be as comfortable as what he usually drives in so he wouldn't want to be in it unless it was for press purposes. There's a reason the Cadillac cost over a million dollars that the presidents usually drive around in.
So to stop robotaxis, all we have to do is paint a fake road directly into a rock wall with a painted on tunnel.
If the roadrunner cartoons taught me anything, it's that no matter what happens, whether you've been blown to smithereens or fell off a cliff and subsequently flattened by a boulder, you'll be good as now in the next scene.
Even a few non-robotaxi people.
New Trump-Hitman challenge unlocked
They sound like they’re perfect for red states
Wonderful news.
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.
Anyone that works in automation will tell you you can't use software to overcome deficiencies of your sensors. They were too cheap to include a reliable Lidar, and now can't have a car that knows where obstacles are.
Elon Musk: Meep, meep
Who the hell is Wile E. Coyote?
Update: I love the downvotes. Look at my username!
The question is could this fool a human
Also I went and watched the video and he doesn't seem to even use full self driving for the wall test
As a human who watches the video, I can say no. The wall would not have fooled me.
Many people tend to doze off so much they would absolutely get fooled. I admit I might, too, especially if the wall is made of a material that needs no guy wires to prop it up. They either used digital effects or a very good color grading job, it's uncanny.
relevant
Are you sure though?
If you knew to expect a wall it is pretty obvious but if you aren't expecting a wall it might prove confusing.
I probably would stop either way.
There's no way the wall would look real as your perspective shifts while yoi over closer to it. Most humans would react to that by at least slowing down.
I watched the video. The wall would not fool a human with object permanence.
Anyone who is fooled, is likely impaired enough that they are not legal to drive.
The hell does that have to do with object permanence?
Probably in the sense that as you're approaching it in the distance you can see the lines around it. When you're that close you can't see them anymore, but you should've realized that it was a wall way before that point.
That kinda makes sense
It is a very high bar for FSD to force it to deal with intentional sabotage of FSD.
This is a matrer of safety so yes, i expect that it can handle any situation
The biggest problem will always be a backdoor that allows remote control of the car for purposes of killing the driver or other people. The Wile E Coyote attack is much more expensive and puts attacker in jeopardy for the time involved in constructing the "trap".
That's not what this is about at all. The idea is that the car needs to handle crazy situations that don't make sense. It might not be a wall but it could be a reflection or some other optical illusion.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/26/24141361/tesla-autopilot-fsd-nhtsa-investigation-report-crash-death
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/05/feds-autopilot-was-active-during-deadly-march-tesla-crash/
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/171ickg/the_final_11_seconds_of_a_fatal_tesla_autopilot/
Most dangerous? Yes. Maybe.
Biggest? No. It's in the magnitude of a spy thriller plot for plausibility.
Exploding pagers would seem like something "government should never be so bold as to destroy confidence in industrial economy". It was praised for being brilliant by our rulers.
Government demanding backdoors is common even when it results in hackers, and foreign agents, finding and exploiting them. The forward thinking component of our government is not as important as maximum control value. The most dangerous car for this application is one that is pure drive by wire, without completely mechanical brake pedal/steering, that further overrides any signal to "wire control" for steering/power input.
Over the air updates is a possible vector for backdoor control, but the FSD feature of summoning vehicle from parking spot to front door, is an RC control feature. Just as key fobs get "cloned", security is not foolproof. The ultra discrete assassination power makes backdoors/hacking features very valuable.
People will definitely fuck with autonomous cars though so you have to plan for it.