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 the hell is Wile E. Coyote?
Update: I love the downvotes. Look at my username!
A victim of American spelling?
They should just program it to drive through the painted tunnel but when another driver comes behind you they crash into it.
“Wile E Coyote was here”
It is a very high bar for FSD to force it to deal with intentional sabotage of FSD.
People will definitely fuck with autonomous cars though so you have to plan for it.
This is a matrer of safety so yes, i expect that it can handle any situation
The biggest problem will always be a backdoor that allows remote control of the car for purposes of killing the driver or other people. The Wile E Coyote attack is much more expensive and puts attacker in jeopardy for the time involved in constructing the “trap”.
That’s not what this is about at all. The idea is that the car needs to handle crazy situations that don’t make sense. It might not be a wall but it could be a reflection or some other optical illusion.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/05/feds-autopilot-was-active-during-deadly-march-tesla-crash/
Most dangerous? Yes. Maybe.
Biggest? No. It’s in the magnitude of a spy thriller plot for plausibility.
Exploding pagers would seem like something “government should never be so bold as to destroy confidence in industrial economy”. It was praised for being brilliant by our rulers.
Government demanding backdoors is common even when it results in hackers, and foreign agents, finding and exploiting them. The forward thinking component of our government is not as important as maximum control value. The most dangerous car for this application is one that is pure drive by wire, without completely mechanical brake pedal/steering, that further overrides any signal to “wire control” for steering/power input.
Over the air updates is a possible vector for backdoor control, but the FSD feature of summoning vehicle from parking spot to front door, is an RC control feature. Just as key fobs get “cloned”, security is not foolproof. The ultra discrete assassination power makes backdoors/hacking features very valuable.
They sound like they’re perfect for red states
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A building owner would not want cars crashing into their property though. Why would they get a mural to intentionally deceive a robot car?
Someone made a mural in Brazil but it was removed for safety.
https://www.jalopnik.com/real-life-wile-e-coyote-drives-fiat-smack-into-paintin-1765745078/
Meep meep.
+1…a classic!
I love that one of the largest YouTubers is the one that did this. Surely, somebody near our federal government will throw a hissy fit if he hears about this but Mark’s audience is ginormous
Honestly I think Mark should be more scared of Disney coming after him for mapping out their space mountain ride.
He probably just made Disney admissions and security even more annoying for everyone else.
Judging by the fact that he has an imagineer-video out (effectively) at the same time as the space-mountain mapping, I’d expect that Disney was fully aware of what he was doing, and the whole sneaky-thing was just to make it more appealing to viewers.
Yep, I could see someone placing a billboard like that with a cliff behind it.
The rain test was far more concerning because it’s much more realistic of a scenario. Both a normal person and the lidar would’ve seen the kid and stopped, but the cameras and image processing just isn’t good enough to make out a person in the rain. That’s bad. The test portrays it as a person in the middle of a straight road, but I don’t see why the same thing wouldn’t happen at a crosswalk or other place where pedestrians are often in the path of a vehicle. If an autonomous system cannot make out pedestrians in the rain reliably, that alone should be enough to prevent these vehicles from being legal.
The question there would be does Austin have crosswalks that don’t have red lights. Many places put a light at every cross walk, but not all. Most beaches don’t have them at every crosswalk, they just have laws that if someone is in or entering the crosswalk you have to stop for the pedestrians. (They would all be at risk from what you are saying).
Yes, there are mid-block crosswalks in some of the walkable parts of Austin. There are also roundabouts with yield signs and crosswalks and no lights.
That will cause huge issues possibly. Do you live near there? We need to get this information to the public in those areas. Even if it is raining. Do not cross without checking over and over. We need to ban them from being there, but we need to protect the people first. 1 life may overturn the law, but 1 life shouldn’t be lost. It’s better we figure out an alternative
Not every pedestrian follows the rules of the lights though. And not every pedestrian makes it across the road in time before the light changes colors from red to green.
I didn’t say anything about whether it was adequate. The fact is it is going live. Trying to find weak spots and dangerous areas and point them out to people is all we can do at this stage.
I don’t know the answer to your question, but I’ll add that I’ve seen major cities that have overhead yellow flashing light boxes that mean “you must stop if there is a pedestrian crossing the road”
That should at least slow them down, but yeah it could be a real threat there as well.
Who owns the White House right now?
Mark Rober is about to be listed as FBI public enemy #1 :(
EPA is going to investigate him for criminal fraud on Monday, I reckon.
Didn’t they dismantle them on Thursday?
TIL Mark Rober is a domestic terrorist
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Tesla doesn’t use lidar for its sensing, living on the prayer that AI will just get good enough soon enough. Absolutely galaxy brained decision.
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almost. Human driver would hit you in similar scenarios probably.
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Where were you that you had to dodge a Waymo? Were you walking down the middle of the road or something?
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We’ve heard one side of the story, about a very unlikely series of events. I do think that person is leaving out a few details.
data > your personal anecdotes. Get real dude.
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What are you even on about tin foil. Waymos are on the road - how is this data doctored? You can literally see that it’s safer than human driving in this exact environment.
No
How? Do you just walk into the road without looking or something?
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Yeah, I definitely think you’re leaving some details out here.
Honestly all the fails with the kid dummy were a way bigger deal than the wall test. The kid ones will happen a hundred times more than the wall scenario.
Some sort of radar or lidar should 100% be required on autonomous cars.
I fully agree, but sadly, investors likely care more about their cars hitting walls than hitting kids. Killing a kid or pedestrian in the US is often a very cheap fine. When my uncle was run over on a sidewalk next to his son, the police ruled it an accident and the city refused to do anything. Same thing happened when my friend was ran over in a bike lane… So killing humans is probably cheaper than hitting a wall.
Interesting that in the most consumerist nation on earth, objects have more value than people.
I think insurances will require that is it comes to self driving at least here in Europe.
EU leading the world in consumer protection laws yet again
