Mark Rober’s Tesla video was more than a little weird

Over the weekend, former NASA engineer and YouTuber Mark Rober published a video that sought to demonstrate the difference between Tesla’s camera-only Autopilot system and a vehicle equipped with lidar. He wanted to see whether the vehicles would stop automatically before hitting a Wile E. Coyote-style wall that was painted to look like a road.

Spoiler alert: the lidar-equipped vehicle brakes before crashing into the wall, while the Tesla Model Y plows right through it.

The video was a huge hit, amassing 10 million views in just two days. A lot of people praised Rober for exposing the dangers posed by Tesla’s driver-assist system. But others accused Rober of faking the video, noting a number of inconsistencies. Some claimed the video was a secret ploy by Tesla’s enemies to undermine Elon Musk’s mission to advanced self-driving cars, thanks to the extensive promotion of Luminar throughout the video. I reached out to Rober to see if he wanted to address any of these claims but haven’t yet heard back.

Personally, I take issue with the title of Rober’s video, “Can you fool a self-driving car.” Neither vehicle in the test was self-driving. Autopilot, which is Tesla’s first-generation driver-assistance feature, does not enable a car to drive itself. And Tesla actually warns drivers to remain engaged and pay attention to the road while using Autopilot. Rober falls victim to that classic blunder: conflating advanced driver assistance with self-driving. We’ve all been there.

Let’s see if we can address some of the other issues as well.

Claim No. 1: Autopilot isn’t on during the test

Most of the criticism about Rober’s video falls into the bucket of people who think he faked the test to make Tesla look bad. They note that Autopilot doesn’t appear to be engaged during the moment when the vehicle smashes through the fake wall, citing images of the vehicle’s central display that lack the telltale graphics — blue indicator lines and a rainbow road — that signal when Autopilot is on.

The noise got so loud that Rober eventually responded by releasing “raw footage” of the test that does indeed show that Autopilot was engaged a few seconds before the crash.

Claim No. 2: Autopilot disengages right before impact

But wait! Eagle-eyed viewers note that Autopilot appears to disengage a split second before impact. Tesla defenders claim that Rober’s hands on the steering wheel actually disengage the system, while more conspiratorially minded folk wonder if this is actually a huge scandal. Is Autopilot programmed by Tesla to turn off moments before a crash to avoid taking the blame?

Yes and no. This aspect of Autopilot has been known for many years. Rober didn’t uncover it, but that doesn’t make it any less questionable.

In 2022, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released an investigation into dozens of incidents in which Tesla drivers, while using Autopilot, crashed into stationary emergency vehicles that were parked on the side of the road. In 16 of those crashes, investigators discovered that Autopilot “aborted vehicle control less than one second prior to the first impact.”

A lot of critics assume this is Tesla’s way to avoid getting blamed when its Autopilot system fails to respond to an imminent crash. And yeah, I can see how it certainly looks that way. But NHTSA didn’t find any evidence that suggests Tesla’s intentions were nefarious. And it’s worth noting that a crash that takes place within five seconds of Autopilot being deactivated is still registered by Tesla as an Autopilot crash.

Claim No. 3: Autopilot is an outdated system

Tesla fans also took issue with Rober’s use of Autopilot for the test, noting that the system hasn’t been updated in years and that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature is the more up-to-date and capable system.

But if the purpose of Rober’s video was to expose the difference between Tesla’s camera-only approach to self-driving and those relying on cameras alongside lidar and other sensors, it doesn’t really make sense to criticize his use of Autopilot. FSD may be more technologically mature than Autopilot, but it still relies on the same cameras as its predecessor.

Tesla infamously removed the forward-facing radar and ultrasonic sensors from its vehicles in 2021 in favor of the new “Tesla Vision” approach. A number of engineers raised objections at the time — only to be overruled by Musk.

Sure, FSD has a more sophisticated software stack, trained on end-to-end neural networks to include city, highway, and parking lot driving scenarios. It’s easy to fire off a post on X claiming the system would have braked before running into Rober’s fake wall. But it also could have made the same error. After all, this is the same company that knew Autopilot had difficulty detecting truck trailers crossing the path of the vehicle and did nothing to fix it.

Claim No. 4: there were multiple takes

In the original video posted on YouTube, Rober engages Autopilot while traveling at 39mph. But in the “raw footage” he posted on X, the system is activated at 42mph — raising speculation that there were multiple takes and that Rober is heightening the drama for his YouTube audience.

To which I would say, yeah, no shit. If you really think a YouTuber with 65 million followers isn’t doing multiple takes in every video before publishing, I have some lovely seaside property to sell you in Ohio.

Claim No. 5: it was sponcon

The prominence of lidar company Luminar’s logo throughout the video has raised questions about whether Rober was paid by the company to promote its technology. And Luminar has conducted its own tests against Tesla’s vehicles in the past to show the advantages of the laser sensor over a camera-only system. As noted by Drive Tesla Canada, Luminar even promoted Rober’s video on its own website before removing it.

In the video’s notes, Rober thanks Luminar for the use of its lidar-equipped vehicle but notes that “no compensation was given, and this is not a paid promotion.”

Claim No. 6: the Pixel phone in the video was photoshopped

Rober supposedly uses a Pixel phone to film some of the shots inside the vehicles, but some users on X note that the “G” on the back of the phone is vertical even when the phone is in landscape, which has led some to speculate that he’s actually filming with an iPhone. Rober has used Pixel phones in past videos, but there’s no mention of Google as a sponsor of the video.

Yeah, I got nothing here. It looks pretty sloppy. And I will note that using Photoshop in a video without disclosing it to your audience opens you up to many valid questions about what else you might be manipulating.

Claim No. 7: the hole in the wall was fake

That is one Looney Tunes-shaped hole, if I ever saw one. If you’re pre-scoring the hole, it seems clear you’re planning to drive through it. That’s all folks.