Tesla removes ultrasonic radar and announces switch to pure vision autonomous driving!

While most car companies are promoting the number of lidars, millimeter-wave radars and ultrasonic radars installed in their products as selling points, Tesla is gradually discarding these sensors.

After canceling the millimeter-wave radar, Tesla said that it will remove ultrasonic sensors from vehicles starting in early October 2022. In the next few months, all Model 3 and Model Y manufactured in some areas of Tesla will no longer use ultrasonic sensors, and they will be removed from Model S and Model X starting in 2023.

With the removal of ultrasonic radar sensors, this means that Tesla will only rely on 8 cameras to achieve automatic assisted driving (Autopilot) or even fully autonomous driving (FSD) of the car.

For autonomous driving, most car companies use the "vision + radar" solution, and some car companies, such as Weilai and Xiaopeng, also support high-precision maps. Although Tesla has also used a lot of radar sensors before, Tesla has always believed that pure vision is the ultimate solution for autonomous driving. Musk believes that roads are designed for humans who use "eyes" and "brains", and it is best for cars to completely use cameras and artificial neural networks to replicate this set of behavior patterns, rather than letting radar data "pollute" the process.

Starting in 2021, Tesla announced that it would gradually remove radar sensors from its vehicles and transition to the Tesla Vision solution. Tesla said that the safety of the pure vision solution is no less than that of the "vision + radar" solution. "Compared with vehicles equipped with radar, Model 3 and Model Y equipped with Tesla Vision maintain or improve their active safety levels in the United States and Europe, and perform better in pedestrian automatic emergency braking (AEB) intervention."

However, completely removing the radar sensor will also limit some of Tesla's functions. In the short term, the parking assist, automatic parking, summon, and smart summon functions of vehicles without ultrasonic radar will be affected, and the above functions will only be available after the subsequent OTA upgrade of the pure vision solution.

After Tesla removes all radar sensors from the car, it will be the pure visual autonomous driving solution that Tesla wants to achieve. Compared with other autonomous driving solutions that continue to pile up multi-sensor fusion on hardware, which one do you prefer?