How late can you throw a skeleton in front of a Tesla before it can't react? That's the question, so that's what we did.
A few months back, AI DRIVR and David Moss put out a really good video where they threw a blow-up doll named Dan-O in front of a Tesla to see how fast the car reacted. Theirs goes further than ours did, and it inspired this whole test. At the end of their video, Dan-O didn't make it.
Or so I thought.
He pulled through, lost a little weight, and showed up in Strike (that's my car's name, BTW) with his new girlfriend, Rib-Ecca. It's not "Rebecca". I got that wrong. Since he was there, I asked if he was up for a similar test. "Sure, why not."
Our setup
Dan-O and Rib-Ecca are the only things that ever went in the road. I stayed on the curb and "assisted" them into it. Marianna was in the car, Supervising FSD, and ready to take over if needed.
Please don't try this at home, primarily because you probably don't have the room to do it. We sure don't!!
I'm not going to pretend I can measure a hundredth of a second accurately. But we shot at a higher frame rate and set up marker flags every 15 feet, so we could step through it frame by frame. My buddy Alex flew his FPV drone to capture it all.
The nap slalom
While we measured things off, Dan-O and Rib-Ecca got tired and took naps in the road.. in separate lanes, about 60 feet apart. That's a pretty perfect slalom course, so we ran it. With FSD driving at 32 miles an hour, Strike went right by them both. Didn't even flinch.
60, 45, 30, then 15 feet
For the rest, I tried to toss Dan-O out when Strike was 60 feet away, then 45, then 30, then 15. We did each of those 3 times, and these are the best of each. Even with the flags it was incredibly hard to time, so my accuracy was not 100%.
60 feet. Marianna was on edge. Strike braked hard, went right on around him, and then turned the blinker on to get back in the lane.
45 feet. Marianna was a little more prepared this time, and it still braked so hard that everything loose in the car went flying, including her hair. Watching it again, Strike brakes hard and starts to turn away the second Dan-O starts to move towards the road.
30 feet. It may look like it's braking hard from the outside, but Marianna says that in the driver's seat you can really feel it. Her word was CRAZY.
15 feet. This one's harder to time perfectly, but I think I got it pretty close. It's still braking hard, just not as hard as the last one, because Strike darted farther into the other lane. The front passenger tire ended up right on the white line. On the run before, it was still in the right lane by a good bit.
One last run
Before we wrapped up, we did one more and tried to throw Dan-O out as late as possible.
Strike hit the brakes hard and dodged even harder, but it ended up clipping Dan-O in the head and spun him around in the road. Marianna's take: pretty crazy, because there's almost no way she could have responded quicker.
So there you go. These Teslas see things SCARY fast.
Huge thanks again to AI DRIVR and David Moss for inspiring this test, and to my buddy Alex for flying the drone. Go show him some love at YouTube or Instagram, @orb_fpv.
FSD (Supervised) still needs you watching the road and ready to take over.
If you love this test and want to see more like it, just let me know in the comments on the video and we'll schedule it.