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?
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.
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.
Is that just to cover his ass cuz he was promising backwards-compatible FSD for models that don’t have LIDAR?
Was just thinking this
A single LiDAR sensor prevents this kind of issue
Indeed there is a lidar car in the video and it works way better in many scenarios.
I’m trying to find an article that covers what I remember but I know for sure that it’s been a good while since I saw the info I recall. Hopefully I can dig something up.
Something like this? https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2022/10/31/former-head-of-tesla-ai-explains-why-theyve-removed-sensors-others-differ/
That might actually be the exact article I’m thinking about. Thanks!
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 🙃
meanwhile our subaru has lidar for adaptive cruise control and emergency braking
So, (looks at watch), in an hour?
So did they unplug it
Yikes.
Iirc they were using a combination of lidar and radar, but Elmo wanted to cut costs.
Cameras and radar, I believe. Never lidar.
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.
Did he want to cut costs or did he want a network of cameras at his control all over the world?
Yes.
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.
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.
Surprised he didn’t swap out the wheels with legs while he was at it
I also know of many times my vision fails. Driving into a sunrise for example
Of course. When I feel myself driving into a wall, I stop immediately.
Yep! That’s what I’m thinking of. It was Elmo. The real engineers objected.
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.
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.
To the famously already fucked planet Mars, no less.