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Tesla loses U.S. designation for some advanced safety features

reuters.com

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Re: Tesla loses U.S. designation for some advanced safety features

#81
post #30

TL;DR: Tesla is removing radar from vehicles to transition to a vision-only system. They will ship vision-only cars before NHTSA has tested them, so the NHTSA can't certify untested vehicles. > Newer Tesla Model 3 and Model Y vehicles will no longer be labeled as having some advanced safety features after the automaker said it was removing radar sensors to transition to a camera-based Autopilot system

Notably, even Tesla says that the vision-only cars will ship with reduced safety features which they’ll backfill later via software update. Given how long they’ve been promising that the FSD beta rollout is right around the corner, I’m not holding my breath.

I believe those are two different things.

Tesla says that software update will be provided in the future that will enable these features using vision cameras (previously radar was used).

NHTSA certified the radar solution and it didn't certified whether the vision one is as safe.

Re: Tesla loses U.S. designation for some advanced safety features

#82

>removing radar sensors to transition to a camera-based Autopilot system A few weeks back, I had a terrible experience while using auto pilot. I was driving on a highway (in CA) with autopilot engaged. For the most part, there was a concrete median on the highway. Suddenly, a section came with no concrete median and a new left only turn lane gets added. For whatever reasons, autopilot thought it is a great idea to su…

Anybody who uses Autopilot deserves to crash. If I am ever in a wreck with somebody who was autopilotting I will probably take out my concealed handgun and execute them on the spot.

EDIT: Downvoted, but I'm totally serious. If you're going to let your robot assault me, I'm going to execute you.

Re: Tesla loses U.S. designation for some advanced safety features

#83

>removing radar sensors to transition to a camera-based Autopilot system A few weeks back, I had a terrible experience while using auto pilot. I was driving on a highway (in CA) with autopilot engaged. For the most part, there was a concrete median on the highway. Suddenly, a section came with no concrete median and a new left only turn lane gets added. For whatever reasons, autopilot thought it is a great idea to su…

That terrifying as hell. I'm sure a lot of people have died/had life changing injuries that were in that same situation :(

Re: Tesla loses U.S. designation for some advanced safety features

#84

I'm having trouble figuring out if this is just another battle in Elon's War with Regulators, if this is NHTSA being too slow to keep up with evolving technology, or if Teslas without radar are actually worse, deserving the loss of these designations. Or what the mix is of all three of those things, I guess.

NHTSA tested Tesla cars that had radar modules. Tesla has decided to remove the radar modules and use only vision systems. The new vision-only models are not NHTSA certified yet, so the NHTSA had to clarify that the safety certification only applies to vehicles shipped before the vision-only transition. That is, any vehicle with radar is still certified, but the new vehicles will apparently ship untested.

This is it, period. You make a new vehicle, you have to go through the certification again, common sense tbh.

Re: Tesla loses U.S. designation for some advanced safety features

#85

>removing radar sensors to transition to a camera-based Autopilot system A few weeks back, I had a terrible experience while using auto pilot. I was driving on a highway (in CA) with autopilot engaged. For the most part, there was a concrete median on the highway. Suddenly, a section came with no concrete median and a new left only turn lane gets added. For whatever reasons, autopilot thought it is a great idea to su…

If you are in the Bay Area, I think I know exactly what intersection you are talking about and I'm surprised it hasn't been fix. Someone died in a Model X at that intersection a couple years ago.

https://mv-voice.com/news/2018/03/23/car-fire-closes-lanes-o...

Re: Tesla loses U.S. designation for some advanced safety features

#86
post #40

This decision from Tesla is going to get people killed. Tesla owners, we should sue Tesla for this. They're going to take away features that influenced our purchasing decision with an OTA update. This should not be allowed.

AFAIK, If you have a Tesla already, it will still use Radar. Model S/X also keep Radar. It's being removed from Model 3/Y. I placed an order in early April and I'm kind of miffed that (1) my delivery was delayed (my original order was supposed to be 4-8 weeks, I'm currently slated for ~10 weeks) (2) there seems to be supply chain issues, but the company denies it (3) after not shipping in cars for 2 months, they anno…

They said they're going to stop using the radar in the existing cars too.

Re: Tesla loses U.S. designation for some advanced safety features

#87
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210312022048/https://www.tesla... I'm pulling this from archive.org, because Tesla has removed this blogpost from their servers. As recently as March, they kept this pro-Radar blogpost up. Only now are they purging this data from their archives. Fortunately, the Internet Archive remembers the history, so they won't find it so easy to rewrite history in their favor.

You meant March 2016? I would not call that recent in the self-driving vehicle world

https://www.tesla.com/blog/upgrading-autopilot-seeing-world-...

Sometime between March 2021 and May 2021 (today), Tesla has deleted this blogpost. The above link is now a dead-link. I've included the original blogpost from archive.org in my earlier post, so that you can see the original content.

My expectation is for Tesla to be honest about their history, and not be ones who delete inconvenient blogposts years later. This selective picking-and-choosing of historical posts is immediately suspect, and extremely damaging to the reputation of the Tesla blog.

In any case, the _timing_ of this deletion event tells us everything. Tesla only recently began thinking about Tesla Vision seriously, which provides evidence that this is a temporary supply chain issue, as opposed to a forward looking technological innovation.

Re: Tesla loses U.S. designation for some advanced safety features

#88
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t Subaru use stereo vision though? Having depth cues and not having them seems like a pretty big distinction, and Tesla just removed their only source of depth.

Tesla has multiple cameras on the front. See: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a36542541/tesla-model-3-mo...

Multiple cameras don’t equate to stereo though. As I understand it, the Tesla cameras have too little overlap and the distortion is too great to do proper stereo - it’s 100% monocular depth estimation.

Re: Tesla loses U.S. designation for some advanced safety features

#89

>removing radar sensors to transition to a camera-based Autopilot system A few weeks back, I had a terrible experience while using auto pilot. I was driving on a highway (in CA) with autopilot engaged. For the most part, there was a concrete median on the highway. Suddenly, a section came with no concrete median and a new left only turn lane gets added. For whatever reasons, autopilot thought it is a great idea to su…

I just don't use Autopilot. It feels so unsafe, maybe that is showing my age but I feel like I'm on a rollercoaster without tracks when I engage it.

It's totally fine, I didn't buy the car for Autopilot, I just wanted a nice efficient car, which it is.

Re: Tesla loses U.S. designation for some advanced safety features

#90
post #55

The irritating thing is it's all so unnecessary. My Tesla is a great car. But I paid an extra $10,000 for a feature that was promised but still hasn't been fully delivered, FSD. It feels like I paid extra for my awesome car to be sabotaged. What was promised by FSD was never going to be possible, and yet they are doubling down. They need to stop this idiocy. The vision system is horrible. The car stops at green light…

FYI Tesla has already told regulators that it won't be able to deliver FSD by the end of 2021, which it had earlier committed to. If you are still holding your breath on it, it's probably time to give it up.
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