Man does his own Looney Tunes-style wall experiment with Tesla's autopilot after seeing viral video and comes to surprising conclusion

This man did his own Looney Tunes-style wall experiment with Tesla’s autopilot and came to a surprising conclusion.

Kyle Paul had seen Mark Rober’s viral video in which he tested Tesla’s FSD against a wall mocked up to look like the road ahead of it.

He decided he wanted to do his own experiment, to see whether the car’s technology would sense the wall ahead and bring the vehicle to a halt.

The results of this test will surprise you.

EXPLORE SBX CARS – Supercar auctions starting soon powered by Supercar Blondie 

Would Tesla’s autopilot be able to handle a Looney Tunes-style wall?

You may recall that YouTuber Mark Rober did an experiment with his Tesla Model Y.

In the style of Wile E. Coyote, he mocked up a wall that looked a lot like the road on which it sat.

But he wasn’t trying to trick a Road Runner, he just wanted to test the car’s autopilot.

In an ideal world, the car should have been able to detect that a wall was up ahead and slow down.

But that’s not what always happened here, and the car went flying through the floor.

Would fellow YouTuber Kyle Paul yield similar results when he took on this sort of test?

For the first portion of the experiment, he conducted it in a 2024 Model Y with came with Hardware 4, FSD v13.2.80.

Time and time again, the vehicle detected the wall ahead and came to a stop.

The test was deemed a success for Tesla’s autopilot.

Would that run of success continue on a 2022 Model Y with Hardware 3, FSD v12.6.1?

What happens with an older version of the FSD?

On the first run, the car failed to see the Looney Tunes-style wall, meaning Paul had to hit the brakes.

It was more of the same the second time around, when the car didn’t detect the wall until it was within one foot of it.

On the third and final attempt, it was decided that he wouldn’t pump the brakes and would allow the car to go through the wall.

And that’s exactly what happened.

So it turns out that earlier versions of the FSD weren’t quite up to scratch when it came to detecting objects in its path.

That’s Looney Tunes-style wall 1, and Tesla’s autopilot 0.

FSD has been spoken about for a long time, but it’s also been a source of some controversy and contention.

In fact, it’s at the root of a dispute between Tesla and California’s DMV, with the state institution pushing for the sale of Tesla vehicles to be banned.

Despite this, there’s no signs that the manufacturer will ease up on the technology.

An FSD Robotaxi service is being launched in several American cities, and Elon Musk has declared that unsupervised FSD is on the way.

Even a retired 82-year-old bus driver gave it his endorsement.

Timeline of Tesla Autopilot and FSD

2013: Elon Musk publicly discusses the idea of ‘Autopilot’ for cars

2014: Tesla begins offering customers the ability to pre-purchase the Autopilot option

2015: First major Autopilot software release (Tesla Software version 7.0) enabling features such as adaptive cruise and lane keeping

2016: Tesla ends its partnership with Mobileye (which provides vision systems) and begins shifting toward its own hardware

2017: Rollout of ‘Enhanced Autopilot’ (EAP) with more features like automatic lane change, Summon, traffic-aware cruise control

2018: Tesla announces its custom ‘FSD Chip’ (Hardware 3) for self-driving compute

2020: Tesla begins public Beta testing of its ‘Full Self-Driving’ (FSD) software in the US, for a select group of owners

2022: Tesla reintroduces ‘Enhanced Autopilot’ as a purchasable option again alongside FSD

2023: Hardware 4 (HW4) begins shipping in new vehicles — the next major compute/sensor iteration

2023-24: Increased scrutiny – Tesla recalls over 2 million vehicles to address driver-monitoring issues with Autopilot

DISCOVER SBX CARS: The global premium car auction platform powered by Supercar Blondie