Why is Tesla quietly turning off the safety radar for some owners?

Tesla It’s been a while since the front radar has been installed on their vehicles, but owners of cars in the United States that have the radar installed are reporting that it is disabled when it comes to service.

Some Tesla owners on Tesla Automobile Club website, as reported by CD driver, noted that there was an extra free job in their service estimate. Tesla customers must agree to this before starting work on their vehicle.

One person posted on Tesla Automobile Club The site asked Tesla to remove the work from the service estimate, but it was automatically re-added later.

Another customer on Tesla Automobile Club requested to have the off-radar feature removed from the vehicle’s to-do list and was told by Tesla that while they could disconnect it, it would be disabled by a future over-the-air update.

ONE reddit user posted a service message about disabling the front radar, which said there was a “fake plug” installed on the sensor itself and the sensor connector.

This means that the radar unit itself is still installed on the vehicle, but not connected. This contradicts previous reports that speculated that the radar unit would be removed from the vehicle.

At this stage, it is not clear whether the radar shutdown on Tesla vehicles will happen in Australia or be limited to North America.

It is understandable that Tesla disables radar units only on vehicles with camera systems capable of using the camera-only Tesla Vision system.

As noted above, Tesla begins removing radar from its vehicles in 2021 and begins remove ultrasonic sensor last year, this will result in some vehicles lacking functionality now supported by the sensors until the camera-based system can be upgraded to compensate.

The company says that with the removal of the sensors, it has simultaneously launched a “vision-based occupancy network” – previously only used on vehicles with the fully self-driving Beta – which it claims giving its vehicles high-definition spatial positioning, greater visibility, and the ability to identify and distinguish objects.

CEO Elon Musk said electricity As of June 2021, it has retired from radar but will consider using it again if it has “very high resolution”.

“The safety probability with pure sight will be higher than sight + radar, not lower. Visibility has become so good that the radar actually reduces signal/noise,” Musk said.

“A very high resolution radar would be better than pure sight, but such a radar does not exist. I mean visibility with high resolution radar is better than pure sight.”

Tesla announced in 2016 that all of its future vehicles would “have the necessary hardware to be capable of full self-driving capability at a level of safety significantly higher than human safety.” people”, citing the use of eight surround cameras, one forward radar and 12 sonar. Sensor.

But Tesla’s pursuit of true Level 5 competence has yet to materialize – a goal that is essentially unattainable for all companies – and Fully Autonomous and Autonomous Driving systems of Tesla is considered Level 2 or 2+.

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