Mark Rober
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2025–2026
18:54 · 36M views · Mar 15, 2025
Mark Rober tests whether self-driving cars can be fooled, comparing a lidar-equipped car with a camera-only Tesla in scenarios including a painted Wile E. Coyote wall and smoke.
HN uses it as the reference demonstration in lidar versus camera debates, though some critics fault its methodology and style.
13 comments from Hacker News
My opinion is that skipping lidar is nonsense. Check Mark Rober's video, published one month ago, "Can You Fool A Self Driving Car?" where he compares a Tesla with other Lidar-equipped cars: this video
Here's a good demonstration why LIDAR SHOULD be implemented instead of what Tesla tries to sell: this video
> For instance, being distracted, poor reaction times, or not being able to monitor all angles simultaneously. As a pitch for self driving, it's going to be a long time before I trust a computer to do the above better than I do. At the very least adding sensors I don't have access to will give me assurance the car won't drive into a wall with a road painted on it. I don't know how on earth you'd market self-driving as competent without being absurdly conservative about what functionality you claim to be able to deliver. Aggregate statistics about safety aren't going to make me feel emotionally stable when I am familiar with how jerky and skittish the driving is under visually confusing driving conditions. Perhaps vision is sufficient, but it seems hopelessly optimistic to expect to be able to pitch it without some core improvement over human driving (aside from my ability to take the hand off the wheel while driving). Edit: hilariously, there's already a video demonstrating this exact scenario: this video
As someone who's done a lot of computer vision, it is insane to skip it. And it's sad because what everyone missed from that viral Mark Rober video [0] was not the Looney Toons wall hit but the fucking kid in the smoke. Add all the cameras and AI you want, you ain't changing the laws of physics: visible light doesn't penetrate smoke. But radar does. Every (traditional) engineer knows that safe systems have redundancy. That safe systems have redundancy through differing modalities. Use cameras, but also use radar, lidar, and even millimeter wave. Using just cameras isn't just tying one hand behind your back, it's shooting yourself in the kneecap afterwards [0] this video
Here is the original Mark Rober video - this video I dislike the fact that Mark's videos appear to increasingly borrow from the Mr Beast style, which is very distracting. There's also the fact that half the video has nothing to do with cars in the first place. The main result here is not surprising - Tesla's vehicles are plagued by a litany of poor engineering decisions, many at a fundamental level. Not using Lidar for depth detection is beyond stupid.