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!
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!
If no one is liable then it’s tempting to deliberately confuse them to crash
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.
To be fair, the roadrunner it was following somehow successfully ran into the painting.
They sound like they’re perfect for red states
Tesla is trash.
Fuck Elon musk.
can someone do this to trumps tesla please
To be fair, I’d be surprised if half the humans driving didn’t do the same.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To any artists in Austin,TX: you have your work cut out for you. Godspeed.
TIL Mark Rober is a domestic terrorist
I tried Waymo when I was visiting LA a few months ago. Genuinely terrific stuff.
I do not trust Teslas one bit though.
waymo’s have almost hit me like three times, and if i were slower, they would have. you are part of the problem. those are killing machines.
almost. Human driver would hit you in similar scenarios probably.
No
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.
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
People will definitely fuck with autonomous cars though so you have to plan for it.
Im glad Luigi & Wile are on the same side.
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.
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.
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?
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?
I was expecting they’d rig it with a dummy sitting
Apparently, yes.
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.
