Watch: Tesla’s Autopilot Fooled by Wile E. Coyote, Engineer Mark Rober
Tesla’s Autopilot assisted driving system, which now relies exclusively on cameras and enables Level 2 autonomous driving at best, has just demonstrated its limits in a video that is going viral online.
Former NASA engineer Mark Rober, who once worked for Apple on its car project and is now a star on YouTube with his own company called CrunchLabs, has just posted the results of an experiment he conducted with a Tesla Model Y on one hand, and a Lexus RX specially equipped with a lidar on the other hand.
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With Autopilot activated, the Model Y managed to detect and avoid a collision with a pedestrian dummy when the latter was stationary, moving or standing in front of blinding lights, but not when fog or heavy rain hampered visibility.
Saving the best test for last, Rober replicated the trick that the famous cartoon character Wile E. Coyote once tried to pull on the Roadrunner, namely blocking the road with a wall painted to imitate the surrounding landscape. Fooled by its cameras, which failed to detect that the road ahead was fake, the Tesla didn't slow down at all and smashed through the foam wall.
By comparison, the lidar-equipped Lexus avoided a collision in all six tests, most of the time with a large gap between the vehicle and the obstacle.
Tesla’s Autopilot keeps coming under fire in the U.S. due to various failures and misleading capabilities that are said to be the cause of numerous accidents, some of them fatal. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) also requires automakers to document and report all real-world crashes involving Level 2 automated driving systems, something Tesla boss Elon Musk opposes.
So far, Tesla has reported more than 1,500 crashes to federal safety regulators under the program. Some media outlets have suggested that new U.S. president Donald Trump’s government, which Musk is a key and vocal part of, may be preparing to drop the car-crash reporting requirement.