YouTuber Tests Whether Tesla Cybertruck is Fooled by Giant Photo of a Road

Another YouTuber built a Wile E. Coyote-style photo wall to find out whether Teslas can be fooled into crashing into them, the way Mark Rober so spectacularly did last week.

Kyle Paul is a significantly smaller YouTuber than Rober so instead of risking his vehicle, he waited to see if Tesla’s vision-based safety features would detect the wall before slamming on the brakes.

Paul tested two Teslas: the 2022 Model Y and the 2025 Cybertruck. The Model Y, like Rober’s Tesla, failed to detect the photo wall with the Full Self-Driving features turned on. The wall was printed to look like the continuation of the road.

“With each run, I had to slam the brakes,” Paul explains. “No doubt, the Model Y would have gone through the wall. I had to brake full force because I saw that the camera, the visualization, was not seeing the wall.”

Next up, Paul convinced a friend who recently purchased a 2025 Cybertruck — which has upgraded hardware and software installed on it — to test whether it could detect the wall. Lo-and-behold the Cybertruck spotted it and stopped while operating in Full Self-Driving mode.

“At no point did I feel like it was going to hit the wall. It recognized it at a good distance,” says Paul.

“I think this is the story of Tesla, they are improving, hardware, cameras, year-after-year as technology advances. They’re putting that technology into their vehicles. There’s a sharp difference between the ’22 Model Y and the ’25 Cybertruck.”

It is worth pointing out that Paul’s photo wall wasn’t as good as Rober’s and the Cybertruck test was done as the daylight was fading, making the wall stand out a little more against the scenery.

There is a debate in the autonomous vehicle world over which vision-based safety features are better: LiDAR systems of camera-based systems.

As my colleague Jeremy Gray explained last week, all Tesla vehicles built for the North American market feature multiple external cameras and vision processing to perform its various functions, including Autopilot (traffic-aware cruise control and automatic steering) and supervised self-driving (navigation, automatic lane changes, automatic parking, summoning, traffic and stop sign control).

All autonomous vehicles require some camera system to see the world around them and process to turn that visual data into safe action.

While some autonomous vehicle makers celebrate LiDAR (light detection and ranging) technology for its superior three-dimensional mapping performance in challenging situations, Tesla claims vision-based systems with traditional optical cameras are better overall because they can better determine precisely what objects exist near the vehicle and improve over time using artificial intelligence. Plus, vision-based camera systems are cheaper, which car makers always like.