Musk bows to radar? Tesla will install radar in new cars next month

According to foreign media reports, Tesla informed the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that it plans to start selling vehicles equipped with a new radar next month.

It is reported that earlier this year, there were reports that Tesla applied to the Federal Communications Commission to use new radars in its vehicles. In order not to release the details of the new radar, the FCC helped Tesla keep the matter secret.

The FCC's confidentiality measures are usually valid for six months, with December 7 being the deadline, but Tesla has applied for an extension. Tesla confirmed in its application that it plans to start selling vehicles equipped with the new radar "in mid-January next year."

Photo credit: Tony Deluca Twitter

Since 2016, Tesla has claimed that its future production cars will have "all the hardware needed" to enable self-driving via software updates in the future. However, it is not.

Tesla has upgraded on-board computers and cameras in early vehicles, but has not yet enabled autonomous driving. Tesla's FSD software is still in the testing phase and cannot achieve full autonomous driving.

In some cases, Tesla not only needs to upgrade hardware, but even remove some hardware. Tesla believes that the best way to implement self-driving capabilities is to use cameras as the only sensor.

Tesla's idea is based on the logic that current road systems are designed for human drivers, who operate vehicles through vision (eyes) and biological neural networks (brain). Tesla believed that the best way was to replace eyes with cameras and replace human brains with neural networks run by computers.

As a result, Tesla removed radar from its vehicles last year and ultrasonic sensors earlier this year.

Image source: Tesla

In June last year, after Tesla stopped using its radar, Tesla CEO Musk revealed to foreign media Electrek that pure vision systems are safer than vision + radar.

However, Musk added that Tesla might still use radar if it had a "very high-resolution radar." "A very high-resolution radar would be better than a purely visual system, but such a radar does not exist. What I mean is that the visual performance of a high-resolution radar would be better than a purely visual system."

There are signs Tesla is working on high-resolution radar. It has been previously reported that Tesla hopes to add a new "4D" imaging radar with an imaging range twice as long as the previous radar. Over the weekend, there were reports that Tesla's new Model 3 prototype may be equipped with a new Autopilot/FSD hardware package.

Electrek believes that Tesla has been continuously improving Autopilot and FSD hardware, but this still exacerbates people's concerns that Tesla cannot achieve its promised self-driving capabilities with current hardware. Therefore, it is possible that Tesla will launch a new set of self-driving hardware next month. The new hardware only improves performance. Tesla still plans to provide self-driving on existing hardware.