this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
1090 points (99.5% liked)

Not The Onion

14963 readers
2837 users here now

Welcome

We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

  1. Links to news stories from...
  2. ...credible sources, with...
  3. ...their original headlines, that...
  4. ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Please also avoid duplicates.

Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Armok_the_bunny@lemmy.world 102 points 14 hours ago (43 children)

I saw the video pop up in my Youtube recommended, but didn't bother watching because I just assumed that any cars tested would be using LIDAR and thus would ignore the fake road just fine. I had no idea Tesla a) was still using basic cameras for this and b) actually had sophisticated enough "self driving" capabilities that this could be tested on them safely.

[–] Lukas@feddit.org 143 points 14 hours ago (32 children)

They are not still using cameras but removed LIDAR and radar from their cars during the chip shortage 2020/21. The story they were telling was "humans don't have LIDAR but can drive cars as well, so the cars also only need 'eyes' like humans".

[–] Undaunted@feddit.org 22 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

That statement of him is not entirely wrong. But we humans have a very powerful bio computer that is perfectly tuned to process those visual inputs in realtime. Until a comparable performance is possible, removing LIDAR is very stupid.

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 13 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Besides that, in the fog and rain tests a human likely would have killed a kid anyway, and why settle for human limitations when you could be safer?

We absolutely should also have lidar or analogous tech as part of a solution here, even if cameras did manage to get to human level safety.

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

The child dummy was clearly visible through the water in the rain test. Tesla's systems just suck.

[–] vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 hours ago

Also competent drivers generally know to slow down during rain. Hell I was literally taught to drive some roads like its a speedway and even I drop below the speed limit during the rain if visuals are bad enough, especially first rain pulls oils out of the road makes it slippery and may cause hydroplaning.

load more comments (30 replies)
load more comments (40 replies)