Tesla’s Self-Driving Fails the Wile E. Coyote Test

One of the biggest obstacles, figuratively, facing self-driving cars is the ability to expect the unexpected, quickly identify potential issues, and respond in a well-reasoned manner to produce a safe outcome. One of the biggest obstacles, literally, facing self-driving cars are giant Wile E. Coyote-style walls painted to look like the road ahead in an attempt to trick them into crashing.

Okay so the latter is pretty unlikely to arise in the real world, but that didn’t stop former NASA engineer and current YouTuber Mark Rober from seeing just how well self-driving vehicles stand up to the Looney Tunes test. In his most recent video titled, “Can You Fool A Self Driving Car?” Rober pits two different autonomous vehicle systems—Tesla’s computer vision-only Autopilot and an unnamed system that uses Light Detection and Ranging sensors—up against each other in a series of tests that culminates in an attempt to stop a car in its tracks using the same technique that Wile E. Coyote tried to use to stop the Road Runner.

At the risk of spoiling the video for you, the Tesla leaves a cartoonishly large hole in the wall after Autopilot plows right through the thing at about 40 miles per hour.

It is the third failure in six tests that Rober runs, including a series of experiments that set out to determine if a self-driving car will mow down a child if the conditions are adverse enough. While Tesla’s Autopilot technology manages to stop for a stationary dummy, a dummy that runs out in front of it at the last second, and a dummy that is obscured by blindingly bright lights, the somewhat autonomous system sends the fake kid right over the bumper when it was hidden by fog and heavy rain. And for as unlikely as it is that you’ll come across a photorealistic recreation of the road in front of you plastered on a wall, fog and rain seem like pretty common obstacles.

By contrast, the LiDAR system succeeded every time. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise as the video is lowkey an ad for LiDAR. It starts with Rober using a portable LiDAR sensor to map out the Space Mountain ride at Disney World and features a plug for a LiDAR manufacturer, so you kinda knew where this whole thing was going from the start.

But it is noteworthy just how effective the LiDAR system was shown to be in the video, as Tesla has very publicly decided to forgo these sensors in favor of relying entirely on computer vision. The reasoning for this varies depending on who you ask and when, but it usually boils down to LiDAR sensors costing too much, requiring more data processing to use, and ultimately serving as a crutch that slows down the development of computer vision. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has gone so far as to call LiDAR a “fool’s errand.”

Maybe that is true, but it also doesn’t barrel through walls, so gotta weigh the pros and cons. Hard to imagine letting your car slam into a kid that it might have avoided with other technology on board and saying, “Well, at least this didn’t slow the development of technology that eventually might not result in this exact thing that just happened.”

Anyway, the video is very enjoyable to watch, as are most of Rober’s efforts. And, judging by the replies to Rober’s tweet showing the footage of the wall crash, it’s turned the Tesla True Believers on Twitter into conspiracists who believe Rober is bought by Big LiDAR and trying to slander Tesla. So that’s fun.