Self-Driving Tesla Crashes into Wall Painted to Look Like a Road… Just Months Before Planned Robotaxi Launch
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 t...
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!
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?
Was just thinking this
A single LiDAR sensor prevents this kind of issue
Even RADAR prevents this and the cars had RADAR! They started disabling RADAR for the older cars since the new ones don’t even have the hardware installed.
Indeed there is a lidar car in the video and it works way better in many scenarios.
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 🙃
Iirc they were using a combination of lidar and radar, but Elmo wanted to cut costs.
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.
Cameras and radar, I believe. Never lidar.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yep! That's what I'm thinking of. It was Elmo. The real engineers objected.
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 wound 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.
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.
Came here to actually write this. Everyone remembers that. He made Tesler the hated shit it is today.
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.
Is that just to cover his ass cuz he was promising backwards-compatible FSD for models that don’t have LIDAR?
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.
It was removed due to supply chain, but Musk did seem to legitimately think optical only was better.
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
I remember Elon foolishly saying his cars don’t need radar or lidar. Even software-disabling radar in cars that already had the hardware.
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.
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.
I mean his right, his cars don't need radar or lidar. They just drive into things.
Yeah but the radar/lidar may allow them to drive into things quicker.
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
I was horrified when I learned that the autopilot relies entirely on cameras. Nope, nope, nope.
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).
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.
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.”
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.
Turns out having radar is rather important..
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
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.
Who was the idiot that removed LiDar to cut costs?
/s
Elon removed the radar. Tesla cars never had lidar. What an idiot Musk.
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.
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.
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.
Have you heard of DeArrow? https://dearrow.ajay.app/
It's a browser extension that replaces clickbait thumbnails with good community sourced ones
I don’t see a problem with thumbnails that accurately portray the contents of the video, since only a small number of characters can fit in the title and a screenshot of one frame from the video doesn’t say much, so it can be difficult to get a sense for the video at a glance otherwise. I do get really annoyed with thumbnails that are deceptive in any way. If the thumbnail seems like it might be deceptive, I’ll usually read the comments before watching the video, or quickly scroll through it to see if it’s BS or not. Sometimes, the thumbnail advertises something that happens at the end of a 20 minute video that could’ve been 30s, in which case, I’ll scroll usually through to the end instead of watching the whole thing. If it weren’t for the thumbnail, though, I might not have watched it all.
yeah but if you share it with people, they'll still see the clickbait thumbnail, and that's the actual problem
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.
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.
Well if your thumbnail is not good enough and catchy people will not watch it. Which wont make the channel profitable. Which will cause it to not exist.
I hope you know that usually youtubers will not even start making the video if they don’t have a killer thumbnail to it. Thats the platform.
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.
True, but Mark's video basically about comparing Tesla's Camera Sensors Vs Self Driving car with a Lidar Sensor.
They also simulated some real life scenarios which the car with Lidar sensors passed easily, while Tesla failed some of them.
So I guess Lidar sensors are superior compared to Teslas cameras.
Where on earth would you find a wall on a road with a fotorealistic continuation of the road printed on it?
Spoken like a man who has never relentlessly pursued a roadrunner, nor taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque.
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.
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.
While I agree that this would trick many human drivers, I think the goal of a self-driving car is that it be better than human drivers. And there is existing tech that could help achieve that.
I actually agree, it's not really a good test. That wall is very realistic. It's just that people get pissed about negativity.
That's more a product if the yt algorithm. For every one like you that is annoyed by the clickbait, there are a million others instantly clicking with no further thought. So if you don't do that, you're losing money.
Maybe, but it's not because of me people get shitty links.
But we OWNED AND SLAMMED Tesla!
But being dishonest about it, detract rather than add to it.
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.
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
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
I found this article. My takeaways were:
- No driving in bus lanes during certain times of day.
- No using the shoulder as a turn lane.
- No using a bike lane as a turn lane.
My vacuum would pass that test... why is a Tesla worse at this?
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.
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.
This
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some cartoon shit
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?
I have another idea: echolocation and laser measurement.
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.
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.
There's a very simple solution to this. BUILD MORE TRAINS!
Meep meep!
Was there a coyote or a roadrunner anywhere nearby?
Yes, they do feature.
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.
That's some Wiley Coyote shit if I ever saw it.
I am very glad that Elon and Trump have overreached and now Tesla is suffering. I hope Starlink is the next domino to fall.
Yup plus the European Union is making their alternative to launch in a year or 2
Good.
I'm not rooting for America to fail, but I'm 100% rooting for Elon to fail.
Mark Rober's video of the six tests (the remaining section is about mapping Space Mountain as Mark wanted to do since he was a kid)
Absolutely hilarious.
You all keep calling it wrong. It's pronounced Tesler.
Teslr
Painted walls, the natural enemy of the Tesla.
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.
Easy
Username checks out.
A genius :-)
Well, I guess we know how to defeat Teslas.
By not purchasing one.
They'll just go out of business eventually.
I wouldn't have bought one before Musk showed his true colors just because of the QA issues and lack of repair support. Me "boycotting" Tesla isn't even a thing because I never wanted one in the first place.
So its road runner rules in play here.
Meep meep
I had a conversation with a friend who claimed the road and sign system we have in our country, has errors in it causing her brand new car to act weird.
By acting weird she meant, phantom breaking. Breaking when the car thinks the car driving the opposite direction is coming head on. Sudden and small jerks inside the lane. Not following the speed limit.
She thought and probably still thinks the road system and not the car, is at fault. It’s a Skoda fyi. These assistants ruin driving. I’m hesitant to catch a ride with her again.
It’s going to get more people killed.
Is this video being suppressed by the YouTube algorithm? I wonder if it's because of Tesla or Disney. Or maybe it's because of simulated child harm?
Show someone footage of 9/11 and they‘ll think of 2001. Show someone footage of a burning or crashing Tesla 20 years from now and they‘ll think of 2025.
This is some amazing stuff! Buy $LAZR! 😁
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.
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?
What would the wall being precut have to do with the car deciding to drive through it?
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.
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.
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" 🤦♂️
Have you tried watching the entire video? The wall is just for shits and giggles. The parts where the Tesla runs over a mannequin in the fog and rain while the lidar Lexus does not is much more serious.
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.
