Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/03/15/teslas-autopilot-anti-collis.html
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I’ve seen stupider things, but not much stupider.
It was her Tesla hoodie that really irritated me, however.
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Do merch hoodies bother you in general? I will agree that it is pretty stupid.
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This reminds me of the recurring opening gag from Reno 911! when they would test a bulletproof vest by having a volunteer put it on and shooting at them at close range. Almost invariably the exercise would end very badly.
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Good thing he’s a better engineer than he is a husband.
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Maybe he’s both and she’s an incredibly durable and lifelike fembot.
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I was going to say this has the feel of that you tube video where the woman shot the guy at close range and they thought the book he was holding would protect him. But things did not go as planned…
I would think someone that can afford a Tesla could also afford to have a life size cutout made of himself and then mount that on a remote controlled car to emulate this situation without risking any actually people.
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Well, that’s assuming we know what the woman with the gun really had planned.
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True. My recolection is that their whole channel was based on doing these types of dangerous and stupid stunts. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t have malicious intent in that particular stunt. Honestly the whole thing was pretty sad and I didn’t dig to deeply into it at the time.
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He think’s it was a success, except that one time when he had to hit the brakes to avoid hitting his wife with his Tesla.
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He sounds like Borat. Not because of the accent, but because… well.
“Let’s test autopilot, wife”
“Good, test with tree”
“What if it fails? Need to test on something soft, wife”
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I’ve seen videos exactly like this before but instead of someone standing on the road, they just stacked a bunch of cardboard boxes together and placed it out onto the road. One in particular kept on increasing the speed to see if the car would still manage to come to a stop in time (it did).
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I didn’t know that William S. Burroughs even had children.
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So, depending on his marriage, this could have been win-win.
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To me that is just as impressive and doesn’t involve unnecessary risk. Also very informative to push the test further and further to find it’s failure point. How skinny can they be before the system fails to detect an object. Or how short? What if the boxes and the back ground are the same color. I wonder if an isomorphic painting on the road of a person would fool the system?
I think it is safe to say Tesla probably tested detecting a person wearing bright colors that contrast well with the background on a bright day with good weather conditions and no other distractions in the vicinity. Much more interesting are the missed edge cases where the system fails to some degree.
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Some (most) men are complete idiots.
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You’re just asking for trouble, aren’t you? 
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