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!
There’s a very simple solution to autonomous driving vehicles plowing into walls, cars, or people:
Congress will pass a law that makes NOBODY liable – as long as a human wasn’t involved in the decision making process during the incident.
This will be backed by car makers, software providers, and insurance companies, who will lobby hard for it. After all, no SINGLE person or company made the decision to swerve into oncoming traffic. Surely they can’t be held liable. 🤷🏻♂️
Once that happens, Level 4 driving will come standard and likely be the default mode on most cars. Best of luck everyone else!
If no one is liable then it’s tempting to deliberately confuse them to crash
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Ask the KIA boys how much they care about murder charges.
Self driving cars don’t need to have anyone on board
Kids already have experience playing hopscotch, so we can just have them jump between the rooves of moving cars in order to cross the street! It will be so much more efficient, and they can pretend that they are action heroes. The ones who survive will make for great athletes too.
There’s a reason GenX trained on hopper. Too bad the newer generations don’t have something equivalent
There is no way insurance companies would go for that. What is far more likely is that policies simply wont cover accidents due to autonomous systems. Im honeslty surprised they wouls cover them now.
If it’s a feature of a car when you bought it and the insurance company insured the car then anything the car does by design must be covered. The only way an insurance company will get out of this is by making the insured sign a statement that if they use the feature it makes their policy void, the same way they can with rideshare apps if you don’t disclose that you are driving for a rideshare. They also can refuse to insure unless the feature is disabled. I can see in the future insurance companies demanding features be disabled before insuring them. They could say that the giant screens blank or the displayed content be simplified while in motion too.
Not sure how it plays for Tesla, but for Waymo, their accidents per mile driven are WAY below non-automation. Insurance companies would LOVE to charge a surplus for automated driving insurance while paying out less incidents.
What is far more likely is that policies simply wont cover accidents due to autonomous systems.
If the risk is that insurance companies won’t pay for accidents and put people on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills, then people won’t use autonomous systems.
This cannot go both ways. Either car makers are legally responsible for their AI systems, or insurance companies are legally responsible to pay for those damages. Somebody has to foot the bill, and if it’s the general public, they will avoid the risk.
I don’t know if I believe that people will avoid the risk. Humans are god awful at wrapping
theirour heads around risk. If the system works well enough that it crashes, let’s say, once in 100,000 miles, many people will probably find the added convenience to be worth the chance that they might be held liable for a collision.E, I almost forgot that I am stupid too
I am a bit disappointed to not see the Tesla crash into a real wall. I feel a bit click baited here.
Also, they prepared the polystyrene wall to break this cartoonishly, but still played on being surprised.
Yeah, do YTers not have the money to kill one Tesla?
That seemed like an expensive production, sadly one totaled car couldn’t make it.Should’ve let WhistlinDiesel “test” it.
For environmental reasons I’m glad they’re not just destroying whatever they can afford to
Yes, you are very right.
The purpose of the video is to test a hypothesis, not to total a car.
Mark Rober is a youtuber sure, and some of the stuff he does is to feed the algorithm. But he’s also an engineer, and that involves experimentation and a good dose of science.
Engineers won’t set up tests that intentionally destroy their expensive test equipment if they can conduct an equivalent test non-destructively.
Did anyone seriously expect it to be a real wall with Rober sitting in the driver’s seat?
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The title of this post is “Self-Driving Tesla Crashes into Wall Painted to Look Like a Road… Just Months Before Planned Robotaxi Launch”. In order to know that someone was sitting in the car, you have to watch the video.
Apparently, yes.
I was expecting they’d rig it with a dummy sitting
Is such depressing cynicism fun for you?
I’m a bit disappointed they painted identical to the actual road. Probably a lot of humans will get fooled by that one. We should send a challenge back: how looney toons can you get? Will something more cartoonish fool it? Will a different landscape fool it? How about drawing an oncoming train?
Haha, oncoming train? You’d be lucky to avoid a slow-rolling freight train at a clearly lit crossing in a Tesla using FSD.
Case in point:
A fitting metaphor for Musky and their involvement with the US government.
Elon Musk: Meep, meep
So to stop robotaxis, all we have to do is paint a fake road directly into a rock wall with a painted on tunnel.
Even a few non-robotaxi people.
“Wile E Coyote was here”
Who the hell is Wile E. Coyote?
Update: I love the downvotes. Look at my username!
A victim of American spelling?
I would say that it’s a good idea to paint more tunnels on walls, but then I remember how dumb human drivers are too
You’d be horrified how many people drive off a bridge that has collapsed, it’s happened multiple times in multiple different incidents.
I’d be horrified that physical barriers with bright reflectors weren’t put up before the bridge that was out.
This has typically been seconds after the bridge collapsed, before emergency services could reach the site.
Did you really think someone just demolished a bridge without putting up a sign?
Taking a guess here, but I think Mark Rober is not a big trump/musk fan? :D
He is studiously apolitical, the only political comment I could find from him was the very sensible advice that we need to tone down our hyperpartisanship :)
https://x.com/MarkRober/status/1641487680168153089?lang=en
For me, I criticize any vehicle that is objectively crappy… and some vehicles where I find them subjectively crappy… and I hope folks don’t assume I’m doing that because of my political leanings.
The story of the disney thing as a reason for why to make a Lidar video, is a great “cover your ass” move.
No one will accuse him of doing it to hit Elmo’s self driving taxi ambitions. but the timing is telling.
he could have made the video at any time, he chose to do it now.
Very surprised Mark isn’t… Super supportive of musk and Tesla.
He owns a Tesla and is rather wealthy at this point. Not to mention that he’s Mormon. I’d expect him to be very conservative and all in on the grift.
(Edit: Ope, I think I misunderstood you, my bad. Disregard my reply.)
What a world we’re living in!
Observing a technical deficiency in a robotics platform requires political considerations. Even when a car drives into a fucking wall at 40MPH on camera, people are asking about the camera man’s political party affiliation and not what’s wrong with the car.
Wild!
Mark is a smart guy, I’m sure he walks great big circles around anything political, at least publicly.
His audience is everybody, aligning publicly with any kind of political flow is generally a bad idea if you want that to stay that way, because the only thing you’ll likely achieve is shrinking your potential audience.
I would also be careful with the assumption that all conservatives agree with what’s currently happening.
Rober is definitely a businessman out to make money and is very self-promoting and will accept just about anybody as a sponsor, but I can’t think of anything he’s done that’s been out-and-out deceitful or political. And he really does have some engineering chops.
I think he’s a good voice for this because he’s been so intentionally apolotical, and even my right-wing family likes his stuff.
Though my YouTube crazy engineer of choice is Stuff Made Here. He spends months between videos, but the stuff he makes is awesome, and he shows off a lot more of the actual creative process. And his fabrication tool collection is insane for a home shop.
Wonderful news.
Im glad Luigi & Wile are on the same side.
Mark Rober. Why did it have to be Mark Rober.
Why not? Seems fitting an ex NASA engineer show Elon, the man currently trying to dismantle NASA, just what kind of intelligent people exist in that agency.
Yeah, but I just can’t stand his presentation style.
Mark Rober is what you get when you cross veritasium with Mr beast. Someone who’s genuinely smart but they’re going to leave all that stuff out because they want the bigger audience
Mark Rober is what you get when you cross veritasium with Mr beast.
I hate that this makes as much sense as it does.
I don’t know anything about him, what’s wrong with him exactly?
There’s something about his presentation style I just can’t stand. Just the epitome of the “hey what’s up guys” approach.
It’s for kids, dude
His target audience is teenagers, so that’s what you get. I think having a guy like him teach kids about LiDAR and stuff in an entertaining way is a win.
But yeah, as a 30 year old I agree he’s a bit too much.
It’s very modern, cheesy & spoon-feedy. Lots of staging. Overly friendly. Like it is filmed with the approval and oversight of HR.
I know what you mean. He does some amazing things, but I tend to stick to the highlights rather than sit through whole videos. This one, the elephant toothpaste vid, and others like it can be watched as a 15 second clip if you just want to see the hook.
It clearly works for his target audience, so I can respect sticking to the formula.
I think that’s largely because he wants to make his channel as kid-friendly as possible. If you watch some of his real early videos, he has a much calmer, more lecture-like demeanor without all the goofy edits and other modern YouTube tropes.
His other big business venture is a subscription box for kids, which I think it aimed for around 8-13 year olds, so I imagine he’s adopted his current personality to try to appeal to that audience.
I love some of the stuff he does (the hot wheels race is absolute gold), but I agree. He’s only leaned further into the cringe since launching crunch labs.
To be fair, he seems to be targeting kids with his content now. Anything to get kids interested in STEM early is a win in my book.
Pre-cutting the polystyrene to make it collapse in a more cartoony way
He shouts all the time. My theory is that the shouty style works for younger US audiences.
For a non-American it’s grating AF.
It’s very shouty, very dumbed down, I can’t stand it. There’s a few channels like that.
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
can someone do this to trumps tesla please
Trump will never be in it. His security detail could never allow him to drive in it. Nor would the back seat ever be as comfortable as what he usually drives in so he wouldn’t want to be in it unless it was for press purposes. There’s a reason the Cadillac cost over a million dollars that the presidents usually drive around in.
In silicon valley there is an episode where a bunch of phones explode because of a software problem. A lot like the pager attack trump got a trophy for. And musk could take any of these cars and “self drive” them to where ever, and “update” their discharge parameters or something, then boom. The trucks are 10k lbs too. Bet you could take a small building down with one without much fuss. They are pretty fast. Scary shit. Musk is a huge problem. Watch all gov envoys being his swasticars and then he can take people out russian style. opps, accident, again.
