- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Tesla Autopilot drove into Wile E. Coyote-style fake road wall in the middle of the road in a camera versus lidar test.
Tesla Autopilot drove into Wile E. Coyote-style fake road wall in the middle of the road in a camera versus lidar test.
Supposedly there’s a difference between ‘Full Self Driving’ and ‘Autopilot’ (the later is what Mark used in the video). I’m not convinced there’s any meaningful difference for a test like this though.
Changing the software behind them isn’t going to magically give cameras the power to see through visual hindrances like rain/fog, or detect range to a nearby object that appears far away (like a painted wall).
Mark states he used it because it was more conservative but commenters are saying it wasn’t on for the wall test.
Hmm…
Taking a close look just now; there’s two conflicting shots.
At 15:34 the blue lines and rainbow effect ‘turn on’ on the center screen. Then the shot from inside the car shows no rainbow/blue lines during impact at 15:42.
I then started looking around a bit and found:
He posted the ‘raw footage’, which shows Autopilot disengage before impact, but not brake. Unfortunately when you compare the two, it’s clear these are two seprate takes: the youtube version had Autopilot engage at 39mph, while the ‘raw footage’ shows it engage at 42mph.
Combined with the obvious advertising/conflict of interest; this one’s gonna have Mark in some hot water… Tesla may even have a solid defamation case here :/
https://teslanorth.com/2025/03/16/busted-mark-robers-misleading-tesla-test-sparks-outrage/
So the question then remains, can the autopilot disengage if it senses an imminent collision so that the manufacturers aren’t held liable?
It certainly could, and wouldn’t really surprise me tbh. Whether it does or not would need to be tested further as unfortunately I think Mark has pretty well destroyed his credibility with this.
It seems pretty clear there was at least two takes of hitting the wall, both times Autopilot was disengaged shortly before impact, and Mark wasn’t honest about it.
There is a huge difference between Autopilot (basically hasn’t been updated in like four years) and FSD. Autopilot is basically just glorified lane keeping while FSD attempts to drive end to end (stop signs, traffic lights, etc.).
Not sure how it would change this test though. FSD is much more vision based than Autopilot.