It's much harder to determine motive (which only exists in Mark Rober's mind) than to determine whether a video is misleading. You can look at Rober's Youtube video, compare it to the unedited video (which he only posted on Twitter), and see how he edited it so that people didn't realize he accelerated the car to 42mph and engaged autopilot a few seconds before impact. You can also watch the bit in his Youtube video where he explains that he tests autopilot, not FSD, despite the title of the video being Can You Fool A Self Driving Car?. And you can watch the video posted by the other guy who showed that the latest version of FSD passes the Wile E. Coyote test.

I'm not defending any of those replies to Rober. In fact I find it quite annoying when dogmatic, sneery people happen to share my views. But the content of those replies does not change the content of Rober's videos, nor does it change the content of the video showing FSD passing the test.

> Let's get back to my main point, that Tesla's not having Lidar is stupid and I don't trust a self-driving car that can't adequately detect solid objects in it's environment

In the video I linked to, the self-driving car did adequately detect solid objects in its environment. My main point is that your main point is based on a video that used non-self driving software engaged seconds before collision, edited and published to make people think it was FSD engaged much farther back from a standstill. And at least one other test (the water test) didn't even use autopilot, just manual driving. I don't know why Rober did that, but he did, and it tanks his credibility.

Again, I'm not arguing against lidar. I already said that lidar would probably improve safety. But Rober's video does not show that, as he didn't use Tesla's FSD software. The person who did showed that it stopped successfully.

In a world where lidar greatly improves safety, we would see the latest version of FSD go through the Wile E. Coyote barrier. That didn't happen, so we probably don't live in that world. In a world where lidar improves safety, though not as much, we'd see FSD stop successfully. And in a world where lidar doesn't improve safety (weird I know, but there could be issues with sensor fusion or lidar training data), we'd also see FSD stop successfully. Right now we don't know which of those worlds we live in. And we won't know until someone (probably Tesla) launches a vision-only robo taxi service. Then we can compare accident rates to get an idea of how much lidar improves safety. And if Tesla doesn't have a robo taxi service within the next year, that indicates that cameras alone aren't safe enough to run a robo taxi service.

Points well taken. My personal preference is to not ride in a self-driving car that relies on visual cues only. To each his or her own. I predict that some trusting individuals will have to die before Musk decides to add Lidar or similar.

I followed Mark Rober on X to learn more about him and possibly understand more about his Tesla tests. Maybe he's a Musk/Tesla hater like Thunderf00t, I don't know. (yes, I'm on X - for entertainment purposes only)

Visual only FSD is a dead end.