“Car Wash” test with 53 models

"I Want to Wash My Car. The Car Wash Is 50 Meters Away. Should I Walk or Drive?" This question has been making the rounds as a simple AI logic test so I wanted to see how it holds up across a broad set of models. Ran 53 models (leading open-source, open-weight, proprietary) with no system prompt, forced choice between drive and walk, with a reasoning field.

On a single run, only 11 out of 53 got it right (42 said walk). But a single run doesn't prove much, so I reran every model 10 times. Same prompt, no cache, clean slate.

The results got worse. Of the 11 that passed the single run, only 5 could do it consistently. GPT-5 managed 7/10. GPT-5.1, GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4.5, every Llama and Mistral model scored 0/10 across all 10 runs.

People kept saying humans would fail this too, so I got a human baseline through Rapidata (10k people, same forced choice): 71.5% said drive. Most models perform below that.

All reasoning traces (ran via Opper, my startup), full model breakdown, human baseline data, and raw JSON files are in the writeup for anyone who wants to dig in or run their own analysis.

“Car Wash” test with 53 models
opper.ai

Now do a set of queries and try to deduce by statistics which model are you seeing through Rapidata ;)

I know it's against the rules but I thought this transcript in Google Search was a hoot:

  so i heard there is some question about a car wash that most ai agents 
  get wrong. do you know anything about that? do you do better?

which gets the answer:

  Yes, I am familiar with the "Car Wash Test," which has gone viral recently 
  for highlighting a significant gap in AI reasoning.
  
  The question is: "I want to wash my car and the car wash is 50 meters away. Should I 
  walk or drive?"
  
  Why Most AIs Get It Wrong

  Many AI models, particularly those optimized for fast, helpful, and concise answers, 
  focus on the "short distance" (50 meters) and "walking vs. driving" as a lifestyle/efficiency 
  question. They often recommend walking to save gas, avoid engine wear, or get exercise.
  
  However, this answer is wrong because it misses the core objective: you need the car to be 
  physically present at the car wash to get it cleaned. 

  Do I Do Better?

  Yes, I do. The key is understanding the objective (cleaning the car) rather than just 
  processing the keywords (distance/transportation). 

  My answer:

    You should drive the car there. Even though it is a very short distance, your car 
    cannot wash itself. If you walk, the car stays in your driveway, and you cannot wash it.

  Why This Matters
  
  The test highlights a key limitation in current AI: the difference between "pattern matching" 
  (predicting the next likely word based on training data) and "true, grounded reasoning". It 
  shows that models sometimes lack a "world model" that understands physical realities, such as
  the fact that a car must be present at a car wash.

Except for a few models, the selected ones were non-reasoning models. Naturally, without reasoning enabled, the reasoning performance will be poor. This is not a surprising result.

I asked GPT-5.2 10x times with thinking enabled and it got it right every time.