21–30 of 349 posts
My rear view camera regularly gets covered with dirt and grime after a highway run during the monsoons. The car has both camera and radar so that I can have reliable assistance while reversing. With this experience in mind I fail to see how Tesla’s camera-only move is reliable for the use cases that they have mentioned.
This is something that comes to mind when I see "designed in California" for a product that can't handle snow. Guess the same thing applies to monsoons!
If this were a planned move, the software would already be ready to replace it. It is not. Cars without radar still aren't at parity with the car that have it, although they "fixed" this a few weeks back by simply turning off the radar on the older cars.
The parking sensors on the Tesla are really good and very useful. They show a rough outline of what is around you and are displayed very nicely compared to some other cars. It is a real shame to remove this, and downright dishonest to characterize it as some kind of leap forward.
The cheapest bargain-bin cars have this feature. Your $100k+ Model S or X will not.
Even more concerning: some features simply cannot be replaced by camera. Tesla infamously does not have a front bumper camera, making it impossible to detect obstructions occluded from view by the hood. For 3/S, which are low, this means it will be impossible to detect low obstructions like too-high concrete wheel stops and similar obstructions. Once the hood has occluded the view from the windshield cameras, these obstructions will cease to exist.
Laughable that this is being done on cars from a high-end brand, and that the remedy for customers who are getting worse cars today than you would get yesterday is to wait for these features to "be restored" at some indeterminate time in the future.
Wow, how fucking stupid. Does that mean that cars that already have ultrasonic sensors (and radar modules) will stop using that sensor data?
The reason why they decided to remove ultrasonics is that combining contradictory signals from cameras and ultrasonic is not straightforward. What should have the higher precedence? So they ultimately decided that cameras can do what ultrasonics can do, but even better. They won't remove ultrasonics from the delivered cars, but they will probably disable them in coming months.
“In the near future, once these features achieve performance parity to today’s vehicles” Right... like how vision vehicles have parity with autopilot speeds and following distance? Oh wait they don't. Vision-only vehicles are still limited to a max of 85mph and 2 car minimum following distance for autosteer while radar is 90mph and 1 car following distance. Texas has 85mph highways. The two car following distance con…
Is that common knowledge, what's the source of that I'm curious.
Wow, how fucking stupid. Does that mean that cars that already have ultrasonic sensors (and radar modules) will stop using that sensor data?
The reason why they decided to remove ultrasonics is that combining contradictory signals from cameras and ultrasonic is not straightforward. What should have the higher precedence? So they ultimately decided that cameras can do what ultrasonics can do, but even better. They won't remove ultrasonics from the delivered cars, but they will probably disable them in coming months.
There are multiple tells that this move, just like the removal of radar, is supply-chain and cost-driven and not actually driven by engineering. If this were a planned move, the software would already be ready to replace it. It is not. Cars without radar still aren't at parity with the car that have it, although they "fixed" this a few weeks back by simply turning off the radar on the older cars. The parking sensors…
I'm sympathetic to the idea that it's possible to drive a car with just cameras, but the specific cameras that Tesla has aren't good enough. They need more coverage, better quality, and self-cleaning.
My rear view camera regularly gets covered with dirt and grime after a highway run during the monsoons. The car has both camera and radar so that I can have reliable assistance while reversing. With this experience in mind I fail to see how Tesla’s camera-only move is reliable for the use cases that they have mentioned.
Tesla cameras have sizeable overlap, so if one is obstructed it tries to extract the information from the others. If it can't then it tells you to clean the cameras. It's not perfect but it's better for them (Tesla) and hopefully better long term for all Tesla owners
Wow, how fucking stupid. Does that mean that cars that already have ultrasonic sensors (and radar modules) will stop using that sensor data?
They specifically call that out in the doc. "At this time, we do not plan to remove the functionality of ultrasonic sensors in our existing fleet."