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!

  • Polderviking@feddit.nl
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    9 hours ago

    I remember elon saying something along the lines of his camera system being just as good and they thusly don’t need to employ things like LIDAR.

  • RambaZamba@feddit.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    48
    ·
    21 hours ago

    Things that happen when you rely exclusively on optical sensors, i.e. cameras. But that’s just cheaper, more money for Nazi Elon.

      • Tzig@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        9 hours ago

        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

  • Jeffool @lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    20 hours ago

    This would be hilarious if it weren’t for shitty cars causing deaths.

    That said, I always wondered why we don’t find a system like RFID that could penetrate concrete and asphalt, and plant passive receivers in roads? We re-pave roads so damn often in this country (the U.S.) it seems like we could’ve knocked it out in the past couple of decades, minus our most rural areas.

    I know RFID itself isn’t strong enough, but I imagine that would’ve been an easier problem than figuring our complete self driving. Not to mention making GPS a secondary system for U.S. road travel in most cases.

    Maybe it’s just a dumb shower thought?

    • JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      6 hours ago

      What you’re describing is just a higher level of autonomy. If I remember correctly, you’re describing level 3 whereas Tesla’s are level 2. I believe VW made a level 3 proof of concept mini bus back around 2020 but the legislation doesn’t allow for the sensors in the road yet because… Oh that’s right. A level 2 car manufacturer owns like half the world right now which means nobody is allowed to innovate or do better than him. Huh, that sucks.

      • towerful@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        12 hours ago

        Echolocation is specifically audio based.
        Lidar is a similar technique, but much more accurate and precise.
        Project a grid of laser beam, read when the laser bounces back, you know the distance to that part of the grid.

    • KayLeadfoot@fedia.ioOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      32
      ·
      24 hours ago

      It’s dirt cheap, too. If this was a cost-cutting measure, it was a thoroughly idiotic one. Which feels like the mark… of a certain someone I can think of

  • Magnus@lemmy.brandyapple.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    82
    ·
    1 day ago

    I remember Elon foolishly saying his cars don’t need radar or lidar. Even software-disabling radar in cars that already had the hardware.

    • gmtom@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      18
      ·
      22 hours ago

      Not even just his cars, he thinks the MILITARY, doesn’t need radar and can just use cameras to spot and track stealth fighters.

      He’s a fucking lunatic.

      • towerful@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        12 hours ago

        As an augmentation, the ability to spot and track objects visually would be amazing.
        But then planes just have to fly above 10k ft, and pretty much guaranteed cloud cover.

  • Yoga@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    22
    ·
    1 day ago

    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.

  • kameecoding@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    85
    ·
    1 day ago

    This is why it’s fucking stupid Tesla removed Lidar sensors and relies on cameras only.

    But also who would want a tesla, fuck em

    • AreaKode@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      37
      ·
      1 day ago

      I was horrified when I learned that the autopilot relies entirely on cameras. Nope, nope, nope.

      • aesthelete@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        15
        ·
        edit-2
        1 day ago

        Leon said other sensors were unnecessary because human driving is all done through the sense of sight…proving that he has no idea how humans work either (despite purportedly being a human).

    • bitchkat@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      30
      ·
      1 day ago

      They never had lidarr. They used to have radar and uss but they decided “vision” was good enough. This conveniently occurred when they had supply chain issues during covid.

    • Mic_Check_One_Two@reddthat.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      20
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 day ago

      They also removed radar, which is what allowed them to make all of those “it saw something three vehicles ahead and braked to avoid a pileup that hadn’t even started yet” videos. Removing radar was the single most impactful change Tesla made in regards to FSD, and it’s all because Musk basically decided “people drive fine with just their eyes, so cars should too.”

    • bier@feddit.nl
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      25
      ·
      1 day ago

      In short because Elon (wrongly) believes you only need cameras, he made the claim people also drive with just 2 eyes.

      The thing is, we recognize a truck with stickers of a stopsign, while AI vision gets confused.

      Waymo (Googles self driving side hussle) was build on lidar and other sensors and has been using robot taxis for many years now in geofenced specific areas.

      • ferret@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        7 hours ago

        The funny thing is, apparently our depth perception, a product of our two eyes, is a feature beyond the reach of tesla. And it would have allowed to to complete this test.

      • Yoga@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        13
        ·
        1 day ago

        The thing is, we recognize a truck with stickers of a stopsign, while AI vision gets confused.

        Lmao would it be illegal to put a stop sign on the back of your car?

        • kelseybcool@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          9 hours ago

          Some school buses have a sticker / sign on the back that says “I stop for railroad crossings” and can have a stop sign on said sticker.

        • CmdrShepard42@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          8
          ·
          21 hours ago

          I was thinking the same thing. What would happen if you popped one out of the back of your car while driving in front of a self driving car on the freeway?

  • EaterOfLentils@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    53
    ·
    1 day ago

    Apparently they keep getting tickets in China because they didn’t bother to adjust the settings to accommodate Chinese roads and traffic laws. Result is Tesla is getting utterly crushed by BYD in their one major market that doesn’t care about Elon’s antics.

    • accideath@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      1 day ago

      Huh, now I’m mildly interested in the differences in traffic laws in China vs US vs Europe that lead to Teslas getting more tickets in China than elsewhere.

      • elephantium@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        1 day ago

        I found this article. My takeaways were:

        1. No driving in bus lanes during certain times of day.
        2. No using the shoulder as a turn lane.
        3. No using a bike lane as a turn lane.
            • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              4
              ·
              edit-2
              17 hours ago

              I think their regs, while seemingly very basic rules of the road, are based because I live in the US and we have bike lanes here that just whole ass turn into turn lanes with almost no warning. I wish we could get basic decency for everyone on the road, too.

              • elephantium@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                9 hours ago

                Ah, gotcha, yeah, that makes sense.

                My own city has pretty good bike lane coverage, but it’s similar – cars have to cross over the bike lane to get into the turn lane.

                Basic decency…gah. Yeah, I wish. :(

  • Naevermix@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    25
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 day ago

    Make Elon test ride the first Tesla robotaxi and there’s a chance the funniest thing of all time will happen.

  • Ghyste@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    284
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    2 days ago

    I seem to recall that fElon prevented the self driving team from utilizing LIDAR for any part of the system, instead demanding that everything run off of optical input. Does anyone else remember the same?

    • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      59
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      2 days ago

      What’s cool is that Teslas used to have radar sensors, at least, but Elon removed them from production to save money. Even if you have a car from back then, the software no longer uses them and they’ll just physically unplug them the next time you have the car serviced, as it’s just a drain on the battery at this point 🙃

        • fulg@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          edit-2
          21 hours ago

          I didn’t realize EyeSight had different versions, on the Solterra it looks like it is indeed LIDAR.

          My Crosstrek has the older dual camera setup for depth perception, it would not be fooled by a picture of a road on a wall… I’m surprised the Teslas are.

    • Arbiter@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      64
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      2 days ago

      Iirc they were using a combination of lidar and radar, but Elmo wanted to cut costs.

      • cyd@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        36
        ·
        1 day ago

        Funny thing is, the price of lidar is dropping like a stone; they are projected to be sub-$200 per unit soon. The technical consensus seems to be settling in on 2 or 3 lidars per car plus optical sensors, and Chinese EV brands are starting to provide self driving in baseline models, with lidars as part of the standard package.

      • Ghyste@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        2 days ago

        Ah okay. I was genuinely curious if I was remembering correctly because I definitely know it’s been awhile since I’d read anything on the subject.

      • ieatpwns@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 day ago

        Did he want to cut costs or did he want a network of cameras at his control all over the world?

    • SapphironZA@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      24
      ·
      1 day ago

      Yes, I recall at the time experts saying it was a terrible mistake and Elon saying Machine learning will bridge the gap.

      The real reason was to increase margins.

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      edit-2
      1 day ago

      Yes. He took too much inspiration from Stanford University’s “Stanley” winning the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005. This was an early completion to build viable autonomous vehicles. Most of them looked like tanks covered in radar dishes but Stanford would up taking home the gold with just an SUV with cameras on it.

      It was an impressive achievement in computer vision, and the LiDAR-encrusted vehicles wound up looking like over-complex dinosaurs. There’s a great documentary about it narrated by John Lithgow (who, throughout it, pronounces the word robot as “ro-butt”). Elon watched it, made up his mind, and like a moron, hasn’t changed it in 20 years. I’m almost Musk’s age so I know how the years speed up as we go on. He probably thinks about the Stanford win as something that happened relatively recently. Especially with his mind on - ahem - other things, he’s not keeping up with recent developments out in the real world.

      Rober just made Musk look like the absolute tool he is. And I’m a little worried that we may see people out there staging real world versions of this somehow with actual dangerous obstacles, not a cartoonish foam wall.

      • KayLeadfoot@fedia.ioOP
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 day ago

        I did low-key get the squiggles before writing the article. I thought, from an ethical hacking disclosure-type perspective, that this info might cause folks to… well, ya know, paint tunnels on walls.

        Then I looked, the cat was already out of the bag, the video had something like 5 million views on it in the 4 hours it took me to draft the article. So I shared it, but I definitely did have that thought cross my mind. I am also a little worried on that score.

    • paraphrand@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      21
      ·
      2 days ago

      I remember there being claims from him or his team about lidar being a dead end that would not scale as well as computer vision.

      • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        23
        ·
        1 day ago

        I believe he claimed that since humans use their vision to drive that computer vision was more than enough.

        I don’t know about you, but I also rely on sounds & feel when I drive. I also know that the human eye has evolved to detect motion, filter out extraneous information, and send just the important bits to the brain so that it doesn’t get overloaded with everything the eye sees. Computer vision is the exact opposite from that, having to process every bit of every image the camera sees.

        • Terrasque@infosec.pub
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          13
          ·
          1 day ago

          since humans use their vision to drive that computer vision was more than enough

          Surprised he didn’t swap out the wheels with legs while he was at it

        • JimVanDeventer@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          1 day ago

          I don’t know about you, but I also rely on sounds & feel when I drive.

          Of course. When I feel myself driving into a wall, I stop immediately.

          • brsrklf@jlai.lu
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 day ago

            You must connect with the road, every km or so stop and hug the asphalt.

    • Ulrich@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 day ago

      Tesla never had LIDAR. That’s the little spinny thing you see on Waymo cars. They had RADAR, and yes it was removed in 2021 due to supply shortages and just…never reinstalled.

      • JcbAzPx@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 day ago

        It was removed due to supply chain, but Musk did seem to legitimately think optical only was better.

    • Kokesh@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      2 days ago

      Came here to actually write this. Everyone remembers that. He made Tesler the hated shit it is today.

      • Ghyste@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        2 days ago

        As a space nut I seriously hope that he never gets a chance to do anything similar with SpaceX. Thankfully he’s mostly been kept away from important things thus far.

        Don’t get me wrong, I know SpaceX’s closet is overflowing with skeletons. But since Congress has been so kind as to continuously cut NASA’s budget for the last few decades, I have to rely on SpaceX and other private companies to keep our space endeavors going.

        • Kokesh@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          2 days ago

          I’m (was) huge SpaceX nerd, but last year or so I’m less and less. He always was dumb narcissist asshole, but now I can’t take it anymore. Also the idea that we’ve fucked up this planet and need to move somewhere else, by doing thousands of launches finishing this planet always made me sick. If someone would take him out, I probably would come back to liking the company.

    • kibiz0r@midwest.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      1 day ago

      Is that just to cover his ass cuz he was promising backwards-compatible FSD for models that don’t have LIDAR?

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          17
          ·
          edit-2
          1 day ago

          He’s said humans don’t use LiDAR so his cars shouldn’t have to. Of course humans have a brain, and he’s cars don’t, but you can’t tell him anything.

            • Bazoogle@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              9
              ·
              1 day ago

              I think it’s also reasonable to say a human dying because of their own actions is different than a human dying because a big corp cut costs on safety features in an entirely autonomous car where the human has no ability to stop what’s happening. (You can control them in current teslas, but they’re working on cars without human controls as well)

              • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 day ago

                Weymo have them beat then. They already have cars that essentially act like taxis and the only control the passenger has is an emergency stop button. But they don’t control the speed they don’t control the steering or anything.

                But those systems absolutely do have lidar because in order for them to be widely accepted they don’t need to be a bit safer than humans they need to be a lot safer than humans.

            • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              4
              ·
              1 day ago

              Human drivers also make automobiles one of the most dangerous ways to travel.

              Same goes for Teslas. Just that the human that’s making them a dangerous way to travel is Elon Musk.

          • zenpocalypse@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 day ago

            Bahaha, what kind of a bizarre statement is that?

            Was he trying to imply the government only uses spreadsheets and nosql DBs?

            Or did he think it was necessary to point out that your average government employee isn’t writing their own SQL to grab data they need?

            • snooggums@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              8
              ·
              1 day ago

              Someone said something he didn’t like so he blurted out the first ignorant thing that he thought of, as usual.

            • JcbAzPx@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              1 day ago

              Even then, that’s not really correct. People grab data through sql queries all the time. Mostly because all the front ends are trash.

      • nialv7@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        edit-2
        1 day ago

        Tesla had camera+radar+sonar, and that wasn’t their own tech - they used mobileye EyeQ back then. When they switched to in house tech they gradually ditched the radar and sonar which made no sense to me. But at the time I saw their lead say in an interview that this is superior and I believed. not anymore.

        they said doing so cut costs but obviously lidar/radar/sonar only gets cheaper over time, let alone the extra r&d costs because a vision only system is much more difficult to develop.

      • jaschen@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        10
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        1 day ago

        It was removed because it was giving false positives. They should have upgraded it with lidar but decided to just remove it.

    • Valmond@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      1 day ago

      They are so expensive too! /s

      Who would have known electronics gets cheaper all the time?? /j