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 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)
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.
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.