It was recently announced that Tesla will be removing sensors for its vehicles. This suggests that the automaker will rely solely on camera-based vision for its self-driving technology. Here’s some discussion of how this works for Tesla.
The sensors will disappear from new Model 3 and Model Y vehicles sold in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Taiwan starting this month, before they roll out globally, Tesla’s announcement read. It plans to phase out the sensors in its Model S and Model X cars next year.
Tesla says the removal of the ultrasonic sensors will not affect the cars’ crash safety ratings. However, cars shipped without sensors will “temporarily” lose access to some features, including Park Assist, Autopark, Summon and Smart Summons. The company intends to restore these features while doing an equally good job using the camera-based system.
The shift away from ultrasonic sensors comes after Tesla announced last year that it would no longer equip cars with radar. Going forward, the company will instead rely solely on the camera-based Tesla Vision system for driver assistance features. last year, New York Times Tesla CEO Elon Musk has reportedly told Autopilot team members “repeatedly that people can drive with just two eyes, and that means cars can only drive with cameras.”
Other features
As with the removal of the ultrasonic sensors, the removal of the radar last year led to temporary restrictions on a few features such as Smart Summons. In the past months, these restrictions have since been relaxed, and Tesla now says these cars “maintain or improve their active safety standards in the US and Europe” and safety features like pedestrian automatic emergency braking are better equipped with cameras than radar. .
But last year’s transition from the radar wasn’t entirely without its problems. This is due to increasing reports of “phantom crashes” where car driver assistance systems mistakenly think the car is about to crash into something. The Washington Post Tesla reported a sharp increase in complaints about automatic braking issues to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration around the time it stopped shipping vehicles with radar sensors. However, there are other challenges with the technology, so we are yet to see how it works for the company. More recently, the constraints have grown from raw material prices to technology.
