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. Watch the video and tell us what you think!
Very surprised Mark isn’t… Super supportive of musk and Tesla.
He owns a Tesla and is rather wealthy at this point. Not to mention that he’s Mormon. I’d expect him to be very conservative and all in on the grift.
Rober is definitely a businessman out to make money and is very self-promoting and will accept just about anybody as a sponsor, but I can’t think of anything he’s done that’s been out-and-out deceitful or political. And he really does have some engineering chops.
I think he’s a good voice for this b3cause he’s been so intentionally apolotical, and even my right-wing family likes his stuff.
Though my YouTube crazy engineer of choice is Stuff Made Here. He spends months between videos, but the stuff he makes is awesome, and he shows off a lot more of the actual creative process. And his fabrication tool collection is insane for a home shop.
Mark is a smart guy, I’m sure he walks great big circles around anything political, at least publicly.
His audience is everybody, aligning publicly with any kind of political flow is generally a bad idea if you want that to stay that way, because the only thing you’ll likely achieve is shrinking your potential audience.
I would also be careful with the assumption that all conservatives agree with what’s currently happening.
What a world we’re living in!
Observing a technical deficiency in a robotics platform requires political considerations. Even when a car drives into a fucking wall at 40MPH on camera, people are asking about the camera man’s political party affiliation and not what’s wrong with the car.
Wild!
Unfortunately when the vehicle in question is created by a company owned by a man operating a government agency, it’s a valid question. He could have just never made the video, but making one that directly opposes the narrative of people you’d expect the “camera man’s” political affiliation to be seems unusual.
We still don’t know for sure. That video will likely become one of, if not his top-grossing videos. The topic and timeliness are absolute fire.
I give him some credit, though. It’s a dicey time to throw Musk under the self-driving bus while showing that alternatives don’t have the same problem.