Tesla Cybertruck on Autopilot Refuses to Ram a Wall with a Painted Empty Road

The example of blogger Mark Rober, who rammed a Tesla Model Y into a wall with a painted road, turned out to be contagious. Imitators began to build fake walls with similar drawings and test their self-driving electric cars on them. It turned out that not all Tesla models react the same way to imaginary obstacles.

Image source: Kyle Paul

Blogger Kyle Paul created his own imaginary road on a fake wall and successively directed a Tesla Model Y with Autopilot version 12.5.4.2 and an HW3 computer onto it, and then a Cybertruck with Autopilot version 13.2.8 and an HW4 computer. In the first case, the experiment ended the same way as Mark Rober’s: Tesla Model Y did not recognize the drawn wall as an obstacle, and the driver was forced to press the brakes himself.

The Cybertruck electric car with the HW4/AI4 computer and cameras behaved differently: the autopilot recognized the obstacle and automatically braked. Before that, the driver demonstratively took his hands off the steering wheel. In the video below, you can see the behavior of each model in front of a camouflaged obstacle.

Since the test results were ambiguous, questions remain about the reliability of Tesla autopilots and the feasibility of using additional sensors to detect obstacles on the road. The company is trying to simplify the sensor system, abandoning, for example, lidars. And although the Cybertruck experiment generally confirms the performance of Tesla engineers’ solutions, a bad feeling still remains.