In the piece — titled “Can You Fool a Self Driving Car?” — Rober found that a Tesla car on Autopilot was fooled by a Wile E. Coyote-style wall painted to look like the road ahead of it, with the electric vehicle plowing right through it instead of stopping.
The footage was damning enough, with slow-motion clips showing the car not only crashing through the styrofoam wall but also a mannequin of a child. The Tesla was also fooled by simulated rain and fog.
Our Mazda 3’s adaptive cruise thought a car that was exiting was in our lane and hit the brakes, right in front of a car I had just passed. Sorry, dude, I made the mistake of trusting the machine.
Incidents like that made me realize how far we have to go before self driving is a thing. Before we got that car, I thought it was just around the corner, but now I see all the situations that car identifies incorrectly, and it’s like, yeah, we’re going to be driving ourselves for a long time.