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Like something straight out of a Road Runner cartoon, Tesla autopilot drove a Model Y head-on, full-blast into a wall with a road painted on it. Thankfully, it was just a Styrofoam wall that was created to test the Tesla autopilot, so no one got hurt by the grave error.
The experiment, conducted by YouTuber Mark Rober, demonstrated the differences between autopilot vehicles that use cameras and those that use Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR). The Tesla autopilot system relies on cameras to determine if there is anything in its path.
In the first two tests, a Lexus RX-based prototype equipped with LiDAR came to a stop for a mannequin that was placed in the road and again when the mannequin was crossing the road. So did the Tesla autopilot system.
However, when fog and rain were added to the test, the Tesla autopilot failed, while the LiDAR system was still able to detect the mannequin in the road.
For the third test, Rober and his team rolled out a giant Styrofoam wall with an image of what appears to be the road the cars will be traveling on. When the car with LiDAR approached the well-camouflaged wall it once again came to a halt, avoiding any collision. When the Tesla autopilot system approached the wall it blows right through the Styrofoam barrier at 40 miles per hour.
As Ronan Glon of The Drive pointed out, these tests show “autopilot doesn’t make a car autonomous by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a Level 2 system, meaning the driver needs to keep both eyes on the road and both hands on the steering wheel.”
He also points out that this isn’t the first time that a Tesla Model Y has shown that LiDAR is critical for any system to truly be called autopilot.
Here’s me driving the Tesla Model Y on the left. It, of course, doesn’t have LiDAR. On the right is the @luminartech enabled vehicle. $LAZR pic.twitter.com/FlQVlQcw8O
— Patrick Moorhead (@PatrickMoorhead) January 5, 2022