Self-Driving Tesla Crashes into Wall Painted to Look Like a Road… Just Months Before Planned Robotaxi Launch
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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!
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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.
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 ...
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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?
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
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The actual wall is way more convincing though.
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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!
Meep meep
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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!
So its road runner rules in play here.
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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!
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.
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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.
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.
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There's a lot of cars that check via camera too to double check, for missing/outdated information and for temporary speed limit signs.
Lots of places also have variable limit signs that get updated based on traffic, accidents etc.
Here in NZ those seem to all be marked on the speed limit maps as 100km/h even if in some places the signs never go above 80.
Ngauranga Gorge is one such location and I believe has the country's highest grossing speed camera.
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The actual wall is way more convincing though.
still, this should be something the car ought to take into account. What if there's a glass in the way?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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
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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.
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.
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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"
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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!
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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.
At this point everyone should know that YouTube thumbnails have no requirement for accuracy. It's more like an album cover.
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They obviously pre-cut the wall, probably for safety reasons, and they were like, let's make it a silly cartoon impact hole while we're at it.
Good job.
You think you're reliably going to notice this after a hundred miles of driving? (X) doubt.
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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.
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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.
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.
