Man Tests If Tesla Autopilot Will Crash Into Wall Painted to Look Like Road

In a damning new video, YouTuber and former NASA engineer Mark Rober has perfectly demonstrated why Tesla relying entirely on visual data from a suite of cameras isn't such a good idea for driver-assistance tech.

The Elon Musk-led EV maker has given up entirely on LIDAR or radar sensors, which its many competitors have been using for object detection for years, with Musk once calling LIDAR "fricking stupid, expensive and unnecessary."

But by relying only on visual data, Tesla's Autopilot can easily be fooled by anything from heavy fog to a wall-scale painting of the road ahead, as Rober showed in his latest video.

It's an incriminating piece of evidence, demonstrating how Tesla's approach could easily lead to a collision. Experts have long warned that the EV maker's cameras-only approach is dangerous, especially when LIDAR and radar exist as alternatives.

Worse yet, Tesla is planning to roll out an "unsupervised" version of its infamous "Full Self-Driving" driver assistance software later this year, according to Musk, which could give already complacent drivers an even bigger false sense of security.

An entire robotaxi service the entrepreneur is also hoping to roll out could exacerbate the glaring shortcoming.

During a series of tests, Rober compares how a Tesla and a test vehicle equipped with LIDAR sensors, courtesy of the company Luminar, react to a child mannequin in the middle of the road.

The Tesla fumbles right out of the gate. Despite registering the kid in the software, the vehicle's emergency braking system refuses to jump into action in time, causing Rober to plow right through the mannequin. The Autopiloted Tesla also failed to stop for the kid mannequin when fog machines obscured the scene. Heavy rain also fooled the system.

In perhaps the most striking example in the video, Tesla was fooled by a Wile E. Coyote-style wall painted to look like the road ahead of it, causing the vehicle to plow right through it.

Meanwhile, the Luminar-equipped Lexus SUV aced all the tests with flying colors.

"I can definitively say for the first time in the history of the world, Tesla's optical camera system would absolutely smash through a fake wall without even a slight tap on the brakes," Rober said in the video.

Sure, a fake cartoon wall isn't exactly an obstacle we encounter on public roads very often, if ever. But Rober's testing perfectly illustrates larger shortcomings of relying soley on cameras.

Tesla's driver assistance tech has already been linked to hundreds of injuries and dozens of deaths by regulators, showing the carmaker has plenty of work to do before its system is actually safe to use without supervision — and whether it even can with its fleet's current sensor hardware is looking increasingly dubious.

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