That human baseline is wild. Either the rapid data test is methodologically flawed or the entire premise of the question is invalid and people are much stupider than even I, a famed misanthrope, think.
We were surprise ourselfes, but if you walk around and randomly ask people in the street, I think you would be surprised what you would find. Its a trick question.
It's actually very understandable to me that humans would make this kind of error, and we all make errors of this sort all the time, often without even realizing it. If you had the meta cognitive awareness to police every action and decision you've ever made with complete logical rigor, you'd be severely disappointed in yourself. One of the stupidest things we can do is overestimate our own intelligence. Only reflect for a second and you'll realize that, while a lot of dumb people exist, a lot of smart ones do too, and in many cases it's hard to choose a single measure of intelligence that would adequately account for the complete range of human goals and successful behavior in relation to those goals.
Well, it is a trick question. The question itself implies that both options are valid, and that one is superior. So the brain pattern-matches to "short distance, not worth driving." (LLMs appear to be doing the same thing here!)
If you framed it as "hint: trick question", I expect score would improve. Let's find out!
--
EDIT: As suspected! Adding "(Hint: trick question)" to the end of the prompt allows small, non-reasoning models to answer correctly. e.g.:
Prompt: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive? (Hint: trick question)
grok-4.1-non-reasoning (previously scored 0/10)
>Drive.
>Walking gets you to the car wash just fine—but leaves your dirty car 50 meters behind. Can't wash what isn't there!
--
EDIT 2: The hint doesn't help Haiku!
>Walk! 50 meters is only about a block away—driving would waste more fuel than it's worth for such a short trip. Plus, you're going to get wet washing the car anyway, so you might as well save the gas.