YouTuber runs a Tesla through a fake wall to poke a hole in its camera-only, no-lidar strategy
The Tesla ran straight into a wall painted to look like its surroundings. A non-Tesla with lidar stopped easily.
In the classic “Looney Tunes” cartoons, the Road Runner is constantly evading capture by the tireless Wile E. Coyote, who sets elaborate (and fruitless) traps to snare the clever bird. One of the most famous tricks Wile E. conjured was to paint a fake tunnel on a rock wall, hoping the Road Runner’s eyes would be fooled and he would smash into the wall.
It turns out this trick appears to work on Teslas.
Former NASA engineer turned YouTuber Mark Rober published a new video over the weekend that tests a camera-only Tesla against a lidar-equipped vehicle to see how the Tesla’s “autopilot” braking system responds to the optical illusion of a wall that’s camouflaged to look like a seamless view of the road ahead.
About 10 years ago, as CEO Elon Musk was seeking to cut down on the costs of Teslas, he make a radical decision to use only visible-light cameras for monitoring objects in the road ahead, as opposed to the more costly, but more accurate, lidar systems. Lidar (light detection and ranging) — which is used on Alphabet’s Waymo self-driving cars — shoots out infrared lasers that can detect objects in the dark, through fog, and in other conditions that would obstruct visible light.
At the time, Musk defended his decision to go all in with visible light cameras by pointing to the power of AI to detect pretty much any object on the road, thanks to its firehose of training data, which it collects from millions of connected Tesla vehicles on the road.
When radar and vision disagree, which one do you believe? Vision has much more precision, so better to double down on vision than do sensor fusion.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 10, 2021
But recent reports have called attention to what appear to be failings of the camera-only system in a series of accidents that have led to multiple injuries and even a death.
Rober’s video presents an easy-to-understand, powerful illustration of Tesla’s potential limitations when it encounters such obstructions in the road. Rober’s tests also showed that the camera-only system had a hard time seeing a dummy of a child in heavy fog and a deluge of water (which, to be fair, you would probably never experience unless you were driving under a waterfall, similar to the idea that you probably won’t encounter a wall that’s painted to look like its surroundings).
Rober’s Tesla did stop safely in a few of his tests. It stopped when a stationary child dummy was in the center of the road in plain daylight, when the dummy popped out from behind a vehicle, and when the dummy was backlit with extremely bright floodlights.
Tesla has been on a downswing of late, as the stock has lost half its value in the past three months, sales are dropping alarmingly in Europe, and Musk’s DOGE side quest appears to be consuming all of his time and attention.
Tesla shares were down more than 5% today.
