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!

    • Flames5123@sh.itjust.works
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      54 minutes ago

      I’m kinda confident that even RADAR + cameras was good enough, but they started shipping cars without it and even shutting off the RADAR in existing cars.

      The main negative about LiDAR is the cost, but that’s quickly going down.

    • KayLeadfoot@fedia.ioOP
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      11 hours ago

      “But humans can do it with their eyes!” - says the man not selling a human brain to go with the optical sensors

      • Ulrich@feddit.org
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        55 minutes ago

        “But humans can do it with their eyes!”

        The thing is, RADAR can see things humans can’t. There was a whole article a while back about a Model X that avoided an otherwise unavoidable accident by bouncing radar under the car in front of it and seeing that car slam on the brakes.

      • FiskFisk33@startrek.website
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        10 hours ago

        “But humans can do it with their eyes!”

        That’s the best part, they kinda can’t.
        There are videos from before they pulled the sensors of some pretty cool stuff where teslas slammed the breaks before anything visibly happened, based on lidar sensors sensing trouble a couple cars up the road, completely blocked to vision.

        super cool safety tech, and then they pulled it…

        one example here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIcC2ZMePKI

        • Rexios@lemm.ee
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          2 hours ago

          Pretty sure that wasn’t even lidar. It was radar which is even cheaper and pretty much every other new car has if they don’t have lidar.

      • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net
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        9 hours ago

        The thing is, yes humans can do it with their eyes. But even with the giant amount of progressing power from the brain they are still not great at it.

        So of the ultimate goal is to the minimum/cheapest to be almost as good as human then yes, optical sensors only are enough.

        Of the goal is to prevent deaths and significantly reduce the number of accidents compared to then lidar is the best option.

    • cm0002@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      The day I heard that was the day I realized he’s a fucking idiot and I wanted nothing to do with his cars/tech.

      Judging by how things have turned out…damn was that a good decision lmao

      • Ulrich@feddit.org
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        57 minutes ago

        They pulled the RADAR from mine just before I took delivery, unbeknownst to me at the time. I received no sort of notification.

    • aname@lemmy.one
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      8 hours ago

      I tried watching it and it forces a horrible dubbing over it so I didn’t want to watch it. Apparently only way to chage it is to change my whole youtube account language

      • jet@hackertalks.com
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        8 hours ago

        for the youtube website interface click on the gear wheel, and you can select the audiotrack you want