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!
Who here thinks that humans are going to notice this wall and stop? What a worthless engagement bait post. And y’all just eat it up.
“most interesting” 🤦♂️
Self driving is supposed to improve on humans, so there’s that.
We’re far from perfect, please don’t get me wrong, but self driving IS already even if not better when compared with most drivers in many situations. It’s a low bar.
Did it slow down when it was covered in canvas
Don’t want to rock the boat but apart from being a you tube money earner this doesn’t prove or disprove anything. A lot of humans would be fooled by this also.
I am suspicious of the way the polystyrene wall broke in cartoon like shagged edges, almost like they were precut.
What would the wall being precut have to do with the car deciding to drive through it?
Nothing much is real anymore on YT
They were expecting this result to be possible. What were they supposed to do? Slam the car into the side if a building?
Yes but the main point that has been shown is that putting a screen up with the exact copy of the road and surroundings behind the screen is a daft and dangerous idea. It would be a better test if they had put up a polystyrene tree in the middle of the road and then checked if the car stopped.
I have never driven through a polystyrene wall with a picture of a road on it in 40 years because people just don’t put those things up, they don’t grow on roads etc etc.
Great YT clip for entertainment though.
Have you never heard of a mural before?
I have never seen a mural on a road depicting a road that is identical to the road that I am driving on. Hope that helps.
Someone else had an interesting take elsewhere on the thread, and that got me looking.
Here is that mural you’re looking for, it’s in South Carolina, took me like 60 seconds of searching to find one so I am sure there are others: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/tunnelvision
Ha well done.
Not sure people will be using self drive around a car park but if that is the plan then I guess you Americans will have to white wash that kind of thing.
Maybe someone should do a follow up experiment to see how different the “mural” would have to be for the car to recognise it. A human would obviously not fall for something like an artistic picture of a fantasy land, but would a Tesla?
The point of the test is to demonstrate that vision-only, which Tesla has adopted is inadequate. A car with lidar or radar would have been able to “see” that the car was approaching an obstacle without being fooled by the imagary.
So yes, it seems a bit silly, but the underlying point is legitimate. If the software is fooled by this, then can you ever fully trust it? Especially when sensor systems exist that don’t have this problem at all. Would you want to be a pedestrian in a crosswalk with this car bearing down on you in FSD?
It may not rise to the level of proof, but it is a memorable and easily understood demonstration of something already proven by car safety researchers, as mentioned in the article.
Why shouldn’t they precut the wall into cartoony shapes? It adds entertainment and doesn’t compromise the demonstration.
Yep agreed. Having used Teslas adaptive cruise control I wouldn’t ever use self driving, not that I have it, unless I had a death wish. Quite honestly my previous Chinese MG was a lot less likely to kill me.
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.
But we OWNED AND SLAMMED Tesla!
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?
And what is this “algorithm” based on?
No one knows.
Actual user behavior. So the way to correct an algorithm is to change actual user behavior, no?
Definitely not. I pretty much exclusively get recommended garbage content, and 90% of it is already on the “trending” page. At least it was like 3 years ago before I stopped using any of YTs first-party front-ends.
I must say that the recommendation section on youtube for me is spot on! Though I spent years on youtube constantly liking and disliking content. But I think it learned me quite well.
When im tired of recommendations I move to subscriptions. And 5 hours just passed by…
Lemme know when they release an OTA for our parietal lobes.
At this point everyone should know that YouTube thumbnails have no requirement for accuracy. It’s more like an album cover.
I know, but if they are about anything serious like tests, I think it’s a fair assumption that the thumbnail represent it reasonably.
If it’s misleading, I don’t want their vomit. They can just fuck right off. We already have more than enough misinformation. I simply don’t want to waste my time on bullshit.deleted by creator
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.
Thanks no I hadn’t. Is that available as a Firefox extension. I do most of my browsing on desktop.
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.The link you replied to.
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 give you a green round ball. You then proceed to ask me the colour and shape of the ball.
The link is right there, you could’ve just clicked it instead of taking the time to write this question?!
OK I see it now, a bunch of icons I usually glance over, because such “icon lines” are generally for a bunch of social media crap I don’t use.
Apparently it’s proprietary crap, so no thanks anyway.
https://github.com/ajayyy/DeArrow
https://sponsor.ajay.app/databaseThis (again) is from the link in the comment you replied to…
Your attitude really doesn’t work well with your lack of reading comprehension.6 hour trial, sounds like proprietary to me.
Privacy Note: Other than intially checking your license key, no requests to DeArrow servers contain your license key.
Edit: I just read the entire text, and it is actually very reasonable, I just caught the license key thing together with the payment option. It’s actually even cheap, so maybe I’ll consider it.
You cannot be serious?! Are you trolling?
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First of all, something not being free (as in gratis) does not mean it is proprietary per se.
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Second of all, your reading comprehension failed you again:
However, if you cannot, or do not want to pay, you can click the button at the bottom to use DeArrow for free. No worries if you can’t or don’t want to pay :)
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You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.
If it’s made to be misleading and baiting, yes I FUCKING should. And so should you and everybody else.
How is it misleading?
The title asks “can you fool a self driving car” and the thumbnail illustrates a cartoon situation that immediately explains how they will attempt to do so in the video.
The video then goes on to not only answer the question, but explore the technology involved in-depth.
It MORE than delivers on the “clickbait”.
Thumbnails can’t be subtle, they typically get viewed at a tiny size compared to the full video and that’s why large high-contrast features work better than a random screencap from the video.
How is it misleading?
You can’t be serious? The clickbait image is not something that might actually possibly happen. The image in the video is.
That is a distinction without a difference.
They are both images depicting a drivable path, on a flat surface.
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.
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.
With this paint job, in this environment? Maybe. Though IRL you would probably see it much clearer due to the lack of parallax effect on a 2D projection.
But if we’re talking e.g. about a dark-ish barrier at knee height, your brain does a much better job to quickly recognize it as obstacle. Whereas cameras without depth perception would fail completely.
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.
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.
IMO it doesn’t need to be a rigorous scientific test, it’s not trying to prove something works as it should under all conditions. It’s showing the exact opposite, it does not work under this one condition, which is more than enough to disprove the safety of the car.
More than one test failed.
The Tesla failed the heavy rain and the heavy fog tests.
There’s zero excuse to fail either of those tests. But the Tesla killed the kid both times.
The wall test was just to show that the Tesla cannot put together optical clues.
Why would children be interested in car safety?
Why would children be interested in anything?
Have you never seen educational content before that wraps up potentially boring teachings in an exciting narrative?
Since most grownups aren’t interested in safety, I just thought it would be even less for kids.
All sales promotion stats show that car buyers basically don’t care about safety features. Almost all significant safety features are there because of regulation.Edit:
I can only laugh at the downvoters, you know nothing. It’s been a well established fact that safety doesn’t sell cars since the 50’s.Seems like a strange application of stats when, as you say, the regulated safety features - the important ones - need not come into a decision-making process and advertising them would be a waste of time.
Stats made over decades back in 50-70’s
So… out of date stats about advertising?
Oh wow, you really didn’t realize? Yeah man this is a youtube channel for getting kids interested in science and technology, like the technology surrounding self driving cars and lidar. Did you see the part where he introduced the technology by taking it to Disney world?
Here’s a random video from crunchlabs, the company he created and advertises on ALL of his videos. This video shows his fan base enjoying what they got from crunchlabs.
That’s cool then, but probably not for me. And I still think it’s misleading. If they made the analogy in the video it would be different. But as it is, it looks like clickbait. And honestly using clickbait on children is actually worse.
They do make the analogy in the video. They reference it multiple times.
Maybe I didn’t have sound, and that’s not the problem, the problem is the thumbnail for the video is clickbait, I don’t get why I have to repeat that so many times?
I understand the joke of the analogy to cartoons, and it’s perfectly fine they make that in the video.“And I still think it’s misleading. If they made the analogy in the video it would be different.”
I was just responding to your own point, mate. Good news, it is in the video multiple times, even visually referenced multiple times. They even described as a cartoonish test while showing the cartoon wall gag. So, per your own words, should be good to go then, yeah? I mean, you’re arguing with yourself at this point.
Why is anyone interested in anything?
My nephew was obsessed with Teslas a few years ago. I asked him why, his response? The indicators can be set to make fart noises.
My 7 year old daughter and I watch Mark’s videos together and they have helped to spark her interest in engineering & science.
My 6 year old kid loves anything about car and enjoyed Marks video. While driving him from school, he asked me why we can tell it’s a wall but the cars can’t. It sparked a 20 minutes discussion on car safety and why we need seat belts.
While driving him from school, he asked me why we can tell it’s a wall but the cars can’t.
Cool inquisitive kid you have there. 👍 😀
Who downvoted this? XD This brings me joy
Still astounded people use anything other than the subscription section on YouTube.
History turned off, subscriptions only for me.
We are in a tiny, tiny minority.
Make Elon test ride the first Tesla robotaxi and there’s a chance the funniest thing of all time will happen.
TaxiGate? I just hope he takes along four or five billionaire friends with him.
Things that happen when you rely exclusively on optical sensors, i.e. cameras. But that’s just cheaper, more money for Nazi Elon.
Are we reeeeally sure optical sensors with fast image recognition software are cheaper than LiDAR?
The hardware is, which is the important part at scale: even if the code is 10x more expensive when you sell millions of the car it becomes pennies/car
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!
You can’t sue me for my driverless car that drops caltrops, forcing everyone else to take the train.
I’ve said for a while that you could shut down an entire city with just a few buddies and like $200 in drywall screws. Have each friend drive on a different highway (or in a different direction on each highway) and sprinkle drywall screws as they go. Not just like a single dump, but a good consistent scatter so the entire highway is a minefield and takes hours to properly sweep up.
I wish all MAGAs a very DEI
Wow you guys even lost the ability to do syntax. I guess it was only a matter of time.
do syntax
Ironic phrase.
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Insurance fraud is going to bankrupt Tesla robotaxis faster than an incompetent CEO ever could.
There will be too many ways to defeat the cameras and not having LiDAR unlike the rest of the industry may prove to be found to be a failure of duty of care.
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.
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.
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.
The same thing a Tesla always does: behave erratically and dangerously.
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.
So don’t delay, act now, missiles are running out. Allow, if you’re still alive, six to eight years to arrive. And if you follow, there may be a tomorrow, but if the offer’s shunned, you might as well be locking on the sun.
Nice.
To be fair, it is really hot…
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 …
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.
The radar module on my truck costs $70.
The richest man on earth doesn’t think the lives of your vehicle’s passengers are worth $17.50 a pop.
And that’s to a knuckledragger like me, buying a single radar unit online. I’m sure the manufacturer gets insane quantity discounts.
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.
The actual wall is way more convincing though.
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.
I am fairly dumb. Like, I am both dumb and I am fair-handed.
But, I am not pretentious!
So, let’s talk about your points and the title. You said I had fairly dumb pretenses, let’s talk through those.
- The title of the article… there is no obvious reason to think that I think computers think like humans, certainly not from that headline. Why do you think that?
- There are absolutely realistic situations exactly like this, not a pretense. Don’t think Loony Tunes. Think 18 wheeler with a realistic photo of a highway depicted on the side, or a billboard with the same. The academic article where 3 PhD holding engineering types discuss the issue at length, which is linked in my article. This is accepted by peer-reviewed science and has been for years.
- Yes, I agree. That’s not a pretense, that’s just… a factually correct observation. You can’t train an AI to avoid optical illusions if its only sensor input is optical. That’s why the Tesla choice to skip LiDAR and remove radar is a terminal case of the stupids. They’ve invested in a dead-end sensor suite, as evidenced by their earning the title of Most Lethal Car Brand on the Road.
This does just impact Teslas, because they do not use LiDAR. To my knowledge, they are the only popular ADAS in the American market that would be fooled by a test like this.
Near as I can tell, you’re basically wrong point by point here.
Excuse me.
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Did you write the article? I genuinely wasn’t aiming my comment at you. It was merely commentary on the context that is inferred by the title. I just watched a clip of the car hitting the board. I didn’t read the article, so i specified that i was referring to the article title. Not the author, not the article itself. Because it’s the title that i was commenting on.
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That wasn’t an 18 wheeler, it was a ground level board with a photorealistic picture that matched the background it was set up against. It wasnt a mural on a wall, or some other illusion with completely different properties. So no, i think this extremely specific set up for this test is unrealistic and is not comparable to actual scientific research, which i dont dispute. I dont dispute the fact that the lack of LiDAR is why teslas have this issue and that an autonomous driving system with only one type of sensor is a bad one. Again. I said i hate elon and tesla. Always have.
All i was saying is that this test, which is designed in a very specific way and produces a very specific result, is pointless. Its like me getting a bucket with a hole in and hypothesising that if i pour in waterz it will leak out of the hole, and then proving that and saying look! A bucket with a hole in leaks water…
Y’all excused, don’t sweat it! I sure did write the article you did not read. No worries, reading bores me sometimes, too.
Your take is one of the sillier opinions that I’ve come across in a minute. I won’t waste any more time explaining it to you than that. The test does not strike informed individuals as pointless.
deleted by creator
I dodnt not read it because “reading bores me.” i didn’t read it because i was busy. I have people round digging up my driveway, i have a 7 week old baby and a 5 year old son destroying the house :p i have prep for work and i just did a bit of browsing and saw the post. Felt compelled to comment for a brief break.
Im not sure what you mean by “silly opinion.” Everyone who has been arguing with me has been stating that everyone knows that teslas dont use LiDAR, and thats why this test failed. If everyone knows this, then why did it need proving. It was a pointless test. Did you know: fire is hot and water is wet? Did you know we need to breathe air to live?
No?
Better make an elaborate test, film it, edit the video, make it last long enough to monetise, post it to youtube, and let people write articles about it to post to other websites. All to prove what everyone already knows about a dangerous self driving car that’s been around for 11 years…
I am sorry, i just dont get it. I felt like I was pointing out the obvious in saying that a test that’s tailored to give a specific result, which we already know the result of, is a farcical test. It’s pointless.
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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
Well that seems like a realistic problem. Not picture of tunnel
It’s the same issue, the car not being able to detect a solid object in front of it because of an optical illusion
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
A camera will show it as being more convincing than it is. It would be way more obvious in real life when seen with two eyes. These kinds of murals are only convincing from one specific point.
That’s true, but it’s still way more understandable that a car without lidar would be fooled by it. And there is no way you would ever come into such a situation, whereas the image in the thumbnail, could actually happen. That’s why it’s so misleading, can people not see that?
I absolutely hate Elon Musk and support boycott of Tesla and Starlink, but this is a bit too misleading even with that in mind.So, your comment got me thinking… surely, in a big country like the US of A, this mural must actually exist already, right?
Of course it does. It is an art piece in Columbia, S.C: https://img.atlasobscura.com/90srIbBi-XX-H9u6i_RykKIinRXlpclCHtk-QPSHixk/rt:fit/w:1200/q:80/sm:1/scp:1/ar:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9hdGxh/cy1kZXYuczMuYW1h/em9uYXdzLmNvbS91/cGxvYWRzL3BsYWNl/X2ltYWdlcy85ZTUw/M2ZkZDAxZjVhN2Rm/NmVfOTIyNjQ4NjQ0/OF80YWVhNzFkZjY0/X3ouanBn.webp
A full article about it: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/tunnelvision
How would Tesla FSD react to Tunnelvision, I wonder? How would Tesla FSD react to an overturned semi truck with a realistic depiction of a highway on it? JK, Tesla FSD crashes directly into overturned semis even without the image depiction issue.
I don’t think the test is misleading. It’s puffed up for entertainment purposes, but in being puffed up, it draws attention to an important drawback of optical-only self-driving cars, which is otherwise a difficult and arcane topic to draw everyday people’s attention to.
Good find, I must say I’m surprised that’s legal, but it’s probably more obvious in reality, and it has the sun which is probably also pretty obvious to a human.
But it might fool the Tesla?Regarding the semi video: WTF?
But I’ve said for years that Tesla cars aren’t safe for roads. And that’s not just the FSD, they are inherently unsafe in many really really stupid ways.
Blinker buttons on the steering wheel. Hidden emergency door handles, emergency breaking for no reason. Distracting screen interface. In Denmark 30% of Tesla 3 fail their first 4 year safety check.
There have been stats publicized that claim they aren’t worse than other cars, when in fact “other cars” were an average of 10 year older. So the newer cars obviously ought to be safer because they should be in better conditions.
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 is far more likely to cause injuries to the driver or the people around the set, just from being heavier material than styrofoam.
Yes, I think a human driver who isn’t half asleep would notice that something is weird, and would at least slow down.
Some cartoon shit
New stuff to add to the car kit bag for the 21st century
- poster board to block usonic weapons
- black paint, white paint, roller, brush to paint tunnels on walls
- orange cones to pen in self driving cars
And a “Yikes!” sign 🤣
Entire video is worth watching. He also snuck a chest mounted lidar into Disney and mapped some rides.
