Vehicles shipped without sensors will temporarily not have access to features such as Park Assistant (helps the driver maneuver while parking) and Smart Summon (full self-driving feature that allows owners to “summon” their car to them using a mobile app) .
Tesla has announced that it is phasing out the use of Ultrasonic Sensors (USS) in its vehicles as part of its transition to camera-only Tesla Vision driver assistance technology (in contrast to the rest of the industry that relies on a combination of LIDAR, radar and cameras). Electrek reports that ultrasonic sensors in Tesla vehicles are primarily used for near-range detection to help with parking and collision warning.
The sensors will initially disappear this month from new Model 3 and Model Y vehicles in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Taiwan, and then worldwide. Next year, the company plans to phase out the use of sensors in Model S and Model X vehicles.
Tesla says the removal of ultrasonic sensors will not affect the car’s crash safety rating. However, models shipped without sensors will temporarily lose access to some features, including auto parking, car call, and smart call. The company intends to restore them as soon as the functions can work well with the camera-based system.
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The move away from ultrasonic sensors follows Tesla’s similar announcement last year that it would no longer make vehicles with radar . In the future, the company will instead rely solely on its camera-based Tesla Vision system for driver assistance features. Last year, The New York Times reported that Tesla CEO Elon Musk “repeatedly told members of the Autopilot team that people can only drive with two eyes, which means cars should only be able to drive with cameras.”
As with the removal of ultrasonic sensors, the removal of the radar last year resulted in temporary restrictions on some features such as Smart Summon. Within months, those restrictions were subsequently eased, with Tesla now saying these vehicles “either maintained or improved their active safety ratings in the US and Europe” and that safety features like pedestrian automatic emergency braking actually work better. with cameras than with radars.
But last year’s abandonment of radar was not without problems. This came at the same time as an increase in “false braking” reports , where driver assistance systems applied the brakes because they mistakenly thought the car was about to collide with something. The Washington Post reported a sharp increase in complaints to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration about problems with automatic braking at the same time as Tesla stopped supplying cars with radar sensors.
Source: The Verge
