Tesla Fans Furious at Video of Tesla Crashing Into Wall Painted Like Road
YouTuber and former NASA engineer Mark Rober has kicked the hornet's nest with his latest video.
In the piece — titled "
Can You Fool a Self Driving Car?" — Rober found that a Tesla car on Autopilot was fooled by a Wile E. Coyote-style wall painted to look like the road ahead of it, with the electric vehicle plowing right through it instead of stopping.
The footage was damning enough, with slow-motion clips showing the car not only crashing through the styrofoam wall but also a mannequin of a child. The Tesla was also fooled by simulated rain and fog.
The stunt was meant to demonstrate the shortcomings of relying entirely on cameras — rather than the LIDAR and radar systems used by brands and autonomous vehicle makers other than Tesla.
"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.
But Tesla's fanboys have since cried foul, arguing that the EV maker could even sue Rober for "false advertising/misleading an audience," according to YouTuber Kevin "Meet Kevin" Paffrath.
In a
response video posted to Tesla CEO Elon Musk's X-formerly-Twitter, Paffrath argued that Rober had disengaged Autopilot right before crashing into the fake wall.
Paffrath went as far as to allege that Rober was being paid by Luminar, the LIDAR tech company that outfitted the SUV that went head-to-head with the Tesla.
Other users on X
argued that Rober should've used Tesla's infamous Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature, which costs a whopping $8,000 on top of the cost of the vehicle.
In a
separate post seemingly responding to the allegations, Rober shared the "raw footage of my Tesla going through the wall."