Tesla drives into Wile E. Coyote fake road wall in camera vs. Lidar test
165 comments
·March 16, 2025desixavryn
I am a massive fan of Mark Roeper. Unfortunately he completely f**d up this one. He tested using Autopilot, not the latest FSD on HW4, which is worlds apart in capabilities. It is possible that the latest FSD would also crash, but that would be a valid test of FSD capabilities. Testing using Autopilot and calling it "FSD crashes" is a HUGE misrepresentation of facts. I am hoping Mark will post an update to the video.
vasco
If anything is misrepresenting it's both the name autopilot and the name "full self driving" for two things that neither are autopiloting or full self driving.
razemio
I think I already had this discussion on HN. I am not sure why most people think autopilot is hands of the wheel without looking. There literally is no autopilot, which does not require constant attention from a human. This is true for planes, ships and cars. Hell this true even for most drones.
FSD is very much correctly named. It does not say you can go for a sleep. It just means, the vehicle is capable of full self driving, which is true for most conditions and something most cars are not capable of. How would you have named it?
PostOnce
> I am not sure why most people think autopilot is hands of the wheel without looking.
Well, because they named it autopilot.
Autopilot means it pilots... automatically. Automatic pilot. Not Manual Pilot, not with intervention, automatically.
They could have named it "driver assist", "partial-pilot", "advanced cruise control", "automatic lanekeeping" or anything else, but they named it Autopilot. That's Tesla's fault.
sorenjan
It's not unreasonable for people to think that "autopilot" means something that automatically pilots a vehicle. According to a dictionary automatic means "having the capability of starting, operating, moving, etc., independently". Whether or not that's how actual autopilots in airplanes and ships works is irrelevant, most people aren't pilots or captains. Tesla knew what they were doing when they chose "autopilot" instead of "lane assist" or similar, like their competitors did. It sounds more advanced that way, in line with how their CEO have been promising full autonomous driving "next year" for a decade now.
It's also worth noting that the recent ship collision in the north sea is thought to be because the autopilot was left on without proper human oversight, so even trained professionals in high stakes environments make that mistake.
oxfordmale
Mercedes has gained approval to test Level 4 autonomous driving. Level 4 is considered fully autonomous driving, although the vehicle retains a traditional cockpit, and the driver can request control at any time. If a Level 4 system fails or cannot proceed, it is required to pull the vehicle over and bring it to a complete stop under its own control.
I would argue that it is getting very close to what people think autopilot can do. A car that, under certain circumstances, can drive for you and doesn't kill you if you don't pay constant attention.
crooked-v
> It does not say you can go for a sleep.
That means, by definition, it's not "full" self driving.
jbs789
This is an interesting point. Maybe the problem is most people don’t drive boats or planes so are not familiar with the experience in those contexts. I think you’re right from the boat standpoint a “auto pilot” means you set a heading and the sails/rudder is adjusted to get there.
akmarinov
> It just means, the vehicle is capable of full self driving, which is true for most conditions and something most cars are not capable of.
But that’s not true.
It’s not capable of fully driving itself, hence why the supervised part was added
quink
Here's what the official Tesla website has to say about FSD vs. Autopilot:
> In addition to the functionality and features of Autopilot and Enhanced Autopilot, Full Self-Driving capability also includes:
> > Traffic and Stop Sign Control (Beta): Identifies stop signs and traffic lights and automatically slows your vehicle to a stop on approach, with your active supervision.
> > Upcoming: Autostreer on city streets
Since I don't see a stop sign, or a traffic light, I cannot imagine how that makes any difference or can in any way be considered a complete f*k up, or how that's a "HUGE misrepresentation of facts". These things, listed here copied verbatim from the website of the manufacturer, are completely irrelevant to what was being tested here. It's like arguing that a crash test is invalid because the crash test dummy had a red shirt instead of a yellow one.
quink
Furthermore:
> Active Safety Features
> > Active safety features come standard on all Tesla vehicles made after September 2014 for elevated protection at all times. These features are made possible by our Autopilot hardware and software system [...]
No mention of FSD anywhere in that section. Tesla fanboys, pack it in.
sschueller
If he doesn't know the difference how is the average car buyer that sees Elon sell such features supposed to know?
bryanlarsen
It's $8000 for FSD. You're going to know whether you bought it or not.
jayd16
You won't know you haven't, which is the whole point.
Hamuko
What if I buy second hand? I heard there's quite a few Teslas available on the used market.
null
zaptrem
To be clear, this is like buying a car that has traffic aware cruise control available as an option, but turning it down, then insisting the TACC is broken and dangerous because it doesn’t work on your car.
tredre3
That's a poor analogy because what Mark was testing was emergency breaking and collision avoidance, which is part of Autopilot.
https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot#active-safety-featur...
TheAlchemist
The good old argument about the "latest" version on the "latest" hardware... As Tesla influencers have been saying for the past 5 years 'it will blow your mind'.
In the very first phrase he says "I'm in my Tesla on Autopilot"...
modeless
The video title says "self driving car". This is clearly dishonest when they intentionally did not test the feature named "self driving" in the car shown in the video thumbnail, nor disclose the fact that such a feature does exist and is significantly better than what they tested.
This video is a real missed opportunity. I would love to see how FSD would handle this and I hope someone else takes the opportunity to test it. In fact, testing FSD is such a trivially obvious idea that the fact that it's not even mentioned in the video makes me suspicious that they did test it and the results didn't match the narrative they wanted.
root_axis
So are you suggesting the 8k upgrade can detect some dangerous obstacles that the standard version can't? I doubt that.
thunky
> He tested using Autopilot, not the latest FSD on HW4, which is worlds apart in capabilities
Unless HW4 adds lidar then it doesn't matter. The video shows lidar outperforming cameras.
iknowstuff
It wasnt even on autopilot when he crashed it. At best, he was testing automatic collision avoidance while pressing the accelerator, not autonomy.
mbreese
You see how this is worse, right? If automatic collision avoidance doesn’t work, why would you expect FSD to do better? (Or more to the point - why would a prospective buyer think so?)
And if collision avoidance doesn’t work better, then why isn’t FSD enabled on all cars — in order to fulfill this basic safety function that should work on all Teslas. Either way you look at it, this isn’t good. Expecting owners to buy an $8K upgrade to get automatic stopping to work is a bit much. Step one - get automatic stopping to work, then we can talk about me spending more money for FSD.
(And yes, I’m still bitter that my radar sensor was disabled).
iknowstuff
Teslas automatic collision avoidance is the best on the market lol you can trivially google it
null
mordymoop
I don’t live near a lot of Wild E. Coyote fake road walls. I get the sense it’s more of a Midwest thing.
viraptor
But that wall may come to you. There's a few large truck trailers I've seen completely covered on a side with a picture which could be interpreted as a road / sidewalk / smaller car / whatever.
rocauc
In the 2019 fatal Tesla Autopilot crash, the Tesla failed to identify a white tractor trailer crossing the highway: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/t...
crooked-v
Also, any wall at a T-intersection with a mural that looks vaguely landscape-y.
taneq
I dunno, I generally try to avoid driving off the road into a landscape.
That said, I very well might drive into a high-res billboard of the exact scenery behind the billboard, if I wasn’t expecting it on a long straight country road. The in-car view in that video looks pretty damn convincing, sure you’d know something was off but I wouldn’t bet on 100% of drivers spotting the deception.
Maybe next video he can show that Autopilot won’t detect a land mine, or an excavation just after the crest of a hill.
gruez
>There's a few large truck trailers I've seen completely covered on a side with a picture which could be interpreted as a road / sidewalk / smaller car / whatever.
Truck trailers are typically 3-4 ft off the ground, and have obvious borders.
thrill
They're obvious to you and me - are they obvious to a camera only Tesla "autopilot"?
viraptor
Are you prepared to try that the "obvious border" is enough? Would you fully trust that there will be no issue?
mikequinlan
>Midwest thing.
Southwest I think.
timeon
It failed also on kid mannequin. Do you have many kids around?
Mo3
Aside of all the other obvious reasons to not get a Tesla these days this is #1 imo. Camera feeds and a neural network are not enough for self driving, no matter how much they're training. Never ever.
nickthegreek
At the very least they seem to have downsides that the can be easily overcame with a lidar system/combination of them. That alone is enough to help me decide when its my family that would be the passengers.
crooked-v
And every other modern auto-braking safety system, except for Subaru for some reason, incorporates at least basic proximity radar.
lowmagnet
I do wonder if this is provable via information theory.
bpodgursky
I am not claiming that Tesla FSD is at this point, but it is obviously possible to use cameras and neural networks to drive a car, because that is literally how humans drive.
seszett
Do Tesla cars have stereo vision, though?
I don't think they build a 3D model of the world around them at all, while humans do (not only based on our stereo vision) and largely rely on that to drive.
andsoitis
Apparently, Tesla has stated that they do not use paired cameras for ranging or depth perception, which is the standard approach for stereoscopic vision.
Instead of stereoscopic vision, Tesla's neural net processes the data from the cameras to create a 3D view of the surroundings.
https://electrek.co/2021/07/07/hacker-tesla-full-self-drivin...
sorenjan
They do build a 3D model: https://youtu.be/6x-Xb_uT7ts?t=129
Although I think it's interesting that even in his demo there are cars popping in and out of existence in the 3D visualization of the environment. I don't think that makes much sense, if a car is observed and then occluded the logical conclusion should be that it's probably still there, maybe add an increasing uncertainty to its location, instead of assuming it disappeared.
iknowstuff
They do have 2-3 front facing cameras and their e2ee does necessarily get the same understanding of the world around it.
rtkwe
Neural nets generally don't have the same level of interconnections and neurons as the human brain because it's tougher to train. I agree in principal that the human brain should be possible to replicate in a computer but I'm not sure we can do it with the current design of single direction connections between nodes. I highly doubt we'll be able to scale it down to a machine that's reasonable to fit in a car any time soon though and that's what Tesla is promising they can do with the current hardware package installed in cars (never mind that they also promised it'd be possible with the last major revision and had to walk that back and will have to install upgraded electronics in people's vehicles, unless they're just going to strand all HW3 owners who paid of FSD but the hardware is to wimpy to handle it unless that's changed since the robotaxi event).
manquer
The actual problem statement is can such a system do so safely. If it is just to drive a car all you need are some stepper motors and a raspberry pi.
The goal is to reduce accident and fatalities not eliminate jobs .
If LiDAR has 1/10th the fatality rate of camera setup and is less costlier than 10x the value of human life(as used in legal proceedings) then it still the only viable option
vel0city
Humans have more senses than just vision. Also a few cameras aren't completely covering the range of human vision.
intrasight
Yes, but I don't think you could argue the point that the visual sense is probably 95% of it. But even so, it could be decades before computers achieve the sensory capabilities of the human visual system. Why not, during those hundred years, add some lidar to the sensory mix. Just because it didn't evolve in humans doesn't mean it's not a good thing. Bats and dolphins use the biological analogue very effectively.
aplummer
Also humans suck at driving compared to what we expect of machines
bpodgursky
? Do you use your sense of smell to drive a car? Are deaf people allowed to drive cars?
No, the cameras we have now, or at least the data processing, is probably not there yet, but it's absurd to claim it's "never" possible. It's obviously either possible in a year or fifteen years, all basic hardware is advancing fast.
nickthegreek
Don’t we want it to be like way better than humans at driving? The dream pitch was that we wouldn’t have tens of thousands of preventable deaths every year. So install the damn lidar. At some point it is coming down to penny pinching and that means that preventable deaths number will not sink to the promise.
jayd16
A human is not just a NN, but I do wonder how well a human could drive given the Tesla camera feed. Seems like it would surely be worse than behind the wheel.
Aloisius
I think artificial neural networks was implied and there is a world of difference between how biological and artificial neural networks function.
That said, I'm not sure that's what the barrier is. I think humans would have trouble driving with a fixed low resolution camera too.
Detrytus
1. Human "neural network" is few orders of magnitude more powerful than the best neural network available right now.
2. This might be obvious question but: Humans have two eyes and they are few centimeters apart so that we could use stereoscopic vision to estimate the distance. Does Tesla FSD even attempt to do something similar?
bpodgursky
It is legal and safe to drive with 1 working eye.
Humans have many ways of modeling distances in the real world that do not rely on stereoscopic depth.
sMarsIntruder
You started with a bias and ended with another one.
dist-epoch
> Camera feeds and a neural network are not enough for self driving
I guess we should ban humans driving then.
desixavryn
Have you used latest FSD on HW4 recently? If not, please try it out for a few days and then come back to correct your comment :-)
Hamuko
Have they managed to fix the "parking sensors"?
desixavryn
Using vision only on my HW4-Model-Y it seems to work fine.
sitkack
We already knew this to be true by the clusters of Tesla fatalities around certain bay area off ramps.
93po
this is factually just not true, at all. like outrageously not true. why would you just completely make something up like this?
sitkack
What are you talking about?
1) numerous reports of teslas not seeing tractor trailers or fire trucks.
2) numerous reports even on this site where teslas under lane assistance repeatedly and predictably behaved erratically on CA off ramps.
Any optical only system will suffer from optical illusions, this cannot be avoided.
sMarsIntruder
This statement goes against any report and analysis on basic autopilot, not even FSD.
Just like the video, that if you’d take some time to watch l, you’d see that’s just basic autopilot.
Data is saying other things, but if we want to deny gravity, I’m ok with it.
davidcbc
What data?
If you link to Tesla statements that's marketing not data.
sitkack
Chill bro, you can have FSD when it comes out.
deedubaya
Where can I buy the alternative lidar based car?
crooked-v
GM is working on it, but no indication yet when the lidwr version will be released. Currently their Super Cruise uses radar and cameras, plus pre-scanned lidar maps of roads that it compares everything against in real time.
randerson
That looked like a Lexus with its insignia blacked out, so I'm guessing it was a custom build. But if you want a car that comes with LIDAR, look at the Volvo EX90.
wmf
Polestar 3 is the only car with lidar in the US that I know of.
jayd16
If you get a 2020(19?) model 3 you get the proximity radar as well.
bspinner
Since it could be misleading without this info: radar has been removed from newer model years.
chvid
In China.
modeless
Adding to the weirdness of this video, it appears Mark Rober faked his footage to make it look like he was using a Google Pixel to record screen video, but he was actually using an iPhone as can be seen in the screen reflection. And he put the "G" logo in the wrong orientation in the faked shot.
Also it's weird that he's acting like he's so special for having seen the inside of Space Mountain as if it's some kind of secret. Millions have seen it all lit up. Back when the PeopleMover/Rocket Rods attractions were running it was a common sight, as the track ran through Space Mountain and sometimes it would be under maintenance with the lights on. And of course in emergency situations they turn the lights on as well.
Another one: he claims they use thin curtains to project ghosts on in the Haunted Mansion which is true, but while he's talking about it he shows footage of a part of the ride that uses Pepper's ghost which is a completely different (and more interesting) technique. Some of the ghosts he shows while talking about it could not be achieved with the curtain method.
Come to think of it, Pepper's ghost could fool lidar. Maybe that's why he didn't talk about it even though it would have been more interesting. It would have been inconvenient for his sponsor. Someone setting up a reflective surface across a road is probably about as likely in the real world as a Wile E. Coyote-style fake road wall.
rocauc
I wonder how long until techniques like Depth Anything (https://depth-anything-v2.github.io/) provide parity with human depth perception. In Mark Rober's tests, I'm not sure even a human would have passed the fog scenario, however.
CaffeineLD50
Nothing new hear in this well produced video championing LIDAR.
Tesla now suffers from a toxic brand way worse for its future than missing lidar.
ricardobeat
Shouldn’t they have tested a human driver too? I have the feeling a majority of drivers would also go right through it if unaware of the setup, as it’s such an inconceivable scenario.
crooked-v
The whole point of driver assistance systems is to be better at this stuff than humans drivers, and most of them, with much less grandiose marketing, would have "seen" the wall in time to emergency brake.
riehwvfbk
And the whole point of this "test" was to go "hurrrr Elon is dumb" and get the "smart" people to click.
nickthegreek
The thing that made Elon look dumb was his car not doing what his competition cars can while dismissing and removing the tech that enabled this safety.
elaus
Sorry, but did you even watch the video? I found the tone to be quite neutral, and he gives Tesla credit where credit is due. Besides, the video isn’t even about Tesla or “Elon”; it’s just one of multiple applications of LIDAR discussed in this video.
rtkwe
A human would (or at least should) slow down going through the water and super dense fog that fooled the Tesla. From the shot behind I could spot the kid through the water blasts, I don't know how it looked in the car.
edit: on rewatch you can pretty clearly see the kid through the rain.
wnevets
Tesla also drives into tractor trailers because they think they're clouds
anotherboffin
Oh but no worries, FSD is a “solved problem” and should be done in 18 months or so…
devnullbrain
Oh dear, your timeline casts doubts on the ability for a Tesla to self-drive from LA to New York before the end of 2017
sMarsIntruder
In fact, he didn’t use FSD.
timeon
Not one the other car either but that one have not failed.
ravenstine
Remember, you gotta break some eggs to make an omelette; every time something crashes, explodes, or kills – that's a good thing! /s
I watched the video, the Wile E. Coyote fake wall stuff is a gimmick meant to draw kids in. That, however, par for the course of his videos; they are designed to hook kids into engineering with silly things and secretly teach real engineering before getting to the punch line.
In this case the real engineering is that Tesla's choice of relying on only visual camera has fundamental issues that can not be solved with cameras only. Namely, visually blocking elements, such as heavy rain, fog, or even blinding lights just pretty much can not be solved by camera-only sensors.
(though I guess one "solution" would be for the system to say I can't see enough to drive, so I'm not going to, but then no one would buy the system)