Mark Rober just set up one of the most interesting self-driving tests of 2025, and he did it by imitating Looney Tunes. The former NASA engineer and current YouTube mad scientist recreated the classic gag where Wile E. Coyote paints a tunnel onto a wall to fool the Road Runner.
Only this time, the test subject wasn’t a cartoon bird… it was a self-driving Tesla Model Y.
The result? A full-speed, 40 MPH impact straight into the wall.
The Looney Toons Test
Here’s the video of self-driving tech versus a wall that only looks like a road.
Rober set up a head-to-head test between Tesla’s camera-based self-driving system and a Lexus equipped with Luminar’s LiDAR-based autonomous technology. While the Tesla plowed straight into the wall, the LiDAR-based system detected the painting as a solid object and stopped in time.
Even better, the LiDAR-equipped Lexus correctly identified a child-sized mannequin through dense fog and a torrential downpour… scenarios where the Tesla ran over the mannequin.
So, what does this mean for Tesla’s big self-driving ambitions?
Scientists Have Been Warning About This for Years
This wasn’t just a fun YouTube stunt. Researchers at the National University of Ireland in Galway and Ireland’s Center for Applied AI at University College Dublin have been looking into this exact problem since 2021.
Their cheekily named “Coyote” dataset (a direct nod to our second-favorite Looney Tune) focuses on “challenging on-road scenarios” for autonomous detection, including murals, billboards, and artistic crosswalks.
Autonomous systems struggle to tell the difference between an actual wide open highway and a picture of a wide open highway, like a billboard might feature or might be printed on the side of a box-truck.
In other words, this was a known issue for years. We had the simulated data. Now, thanks to Mark Rober, we have the real-world test: a commercially available self-driving Tesla mistook an image of a road for an actually navigable road and crashed into it at full speed.
Oh Right, the Planned Unsupervised Robotaxi Launch Is Less Than 3 Months Away
The timing of this couldn’t be worse for Tesla. Just a few months from now, the company plans to launch its first “unsupervised” Robotaxi program in Austin, Texas.
Here’s what Elon Musk said during Tesla’s Q4 2024 earnings call:
“So, we’re going to be launching unsupervised full self-driving as a paid service in Austin in June. So, I talked to the team. We feel confident in being able to do an initial launch of unsupervised, no one in the car, full self-driving in Austin in June.”
So, to recap:
- In less than 3 months, Tesla plans to launch a paid service with no human driver.
- Tesla’s self-driving system just crashed at full speed into a painted wall that looked like a road.
- Scientists have been warning about this exact theoretical problem for years.
If Tesla is serious about rolling out a fleet of self-driving Robotaxis, they might want to spend the next 3 months solving the Wile E. Coyote problem. Otherwise, let’s just hope Austin doesn’t have too many murals that look like roads.
