- Popular YouTuber allegedly tricks Tesla Autopilot with picture of a road on a brick wall, Wile E. Coyote-style
- Rober’s test tries the same with a lidar-equipped vehicle, but can’t pull a fast one on that piece of tech
- Reaction was swift and predictable from Tesla defenders, who allege bias, among other criticisms
Readers of a certain age will remember growing up watching cartoons of the Road Runner outfoxing Wile E. Coyote by painting a tunnel opening onto a rock face. They’ll also remember laughing at the resulting hilarity, when the Coyote ran right into said rock face. Well, a popular YouTuber (and former NASA engineer) named Mark Rober with over 65 million subscribers recently tried to trick a Tesla Model Y on Autopilot mode by doing something eerily similar—and got an eerily similar outcome.
If you know anything about the limits of the cameras used to power many modern semi-autonomous driving aids, you might even call it predictable.
Also predictable was the response from other less successful YouTubers – such as this one, whose owner’s profile pic is him posed next to a Cybertruck – as they rushed to Tesla’s defence. (Your author is literally dumber for having visited that particular YouTube channel, and will be seeking danger pay from Postmedia the next time he is assigned this beat.)
Back to that original video: Rober set up a series of (admittedly not really scientific) tests to try and trip up a Tesla equipped with Autopilot, a task that’s apparently not all that difficult to accomplish. Ask a driver, any driver, who has had some serious seat time behind the wheel of an Autopilot-equipped Tesla, SuperCruise-equipped GM, or BlueCruise-equipped Ford, and the opinion you’ll find is likely to be similar: Autopilot is not all it’s cracked up to be, and certainly not the Second Coming as foretold by leagues of blind Tesla stans.
But complicating matters in this test is the fact Rober teamed up with Luminar to test one of their LiDAR-equipped vehicles, though the channel does note no compensation was given, and the video was not a paid promotion. But, yeah, again, unsurprisingly, rabid Tesla bros have come out of the woodwork to attack the original test, and the inclusion of the Luminar Lexus prototype as a point of reference is a sore spot for them.
Some of the other criticisms include allegations that Autopilot wasn’t actually engaged during the test, based on an analysis of what’s shown on-screen; and that the version of Autopilot purportedly used is 10 years old, and not cutting-edge as Rober implies, nor Tesla’s more recent Full Self-Driving (FSD).
Other, less angsty viewers have also given their take, to the tune of nearly 11 million views and half-a-million likes in the span of roughly 48 hours. Whether Rober’s test is flawed or not, the issues with Tesla Autopilot – besides, of course, its horribly misleading name – have been documented time and time again on these digital pages, as have those of other autonomous driving helpers.
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