It is reported on the Internet that Tesla’s new Model 3 cancels all radars and focuses on full-view assisted driving.

Today, a senior industry blogger, Tesla China Analyst, announced through social media that Tesla’s new Model 3 has undergone major changes in hardware configuration. The new Model 3 may adopt a “full vision assisted driving” system, and the vehicle will be cancelled. All radar sensors. This news has attracted widespread attention in the industry. If the new Model 3 cancels all radars, it will become Tesla's historic model carrying pure visual navigation FSD (fully autonomous driving).

The blogger revealed that the new Model 3 is equipped with HW3.5 hardware instead of HW4.0, and "all radars have been removed." Since the manufacturing cost of the entire vehicle has "significantly dropped" compared with the previous generation, it adopts integrated casting, reduces wiring harnesses and uses more new materials, the pricing is expected to remain around RMB 200,000. The blogger also revealed that the new Model 3 has completed its trial production phase and is expected to achieve production of about 1,200 units per day in early September.

The new Model 3 has always been the focus of media attention. The production and launch date of Model 3 are basically within expectations, but the news this time is very different from before. It was previously reported that the biggest adjustment of the new Model 3 is to adopt the HW4.0 hardware system. The most important upgrade of this system is to increase the number of cameras from 9 to 12, add a 4D millimeter wave radar, but cancel the ultrasonic radar. But this time the news said that the new Model 3 has eliminated all radars. If this news is true, it shows the new Model 3's determination in the field of "full vision assisted driving" system.

Domestic early autonomous driving solutions mainly use lidar + high-precision maps. In 2021, Tesla introduced the BEV + Transformer algorithm form to autonomous driving for the first time at AI Day, opening up autonomous driving based on large-model vision algorithms. New Era. The BEV+Transformer algorithm can construct a high-precision local map in real time on the vehicle end that is comparable to high-precision maps. It can achieve a deep understanding of the static scenes required for autonomous driving under any conventional road conditions, and then based on this, end-to-end output obstacles It can realize autonomous driving applications in complex scenarios without relying on high-precision maps. Since the algorithm released by BEV+Transformer, it has been widely recognized by the industry, and many domestic players have actively followed up, including Huawei, Horizon, Li Auto, Xpeng Motors, etc., all of which have laid out the algorithm form of BEV+transformer and launched their own large-scale algorithms. Model algorithm.

Tesla previously announced that it is expected to fully launch FSD (fully autonomous driving) within this year. Musk himself also claimed that Tesla FSD will be several times safer than human driving. Due to the technological progress Tesla has made in the field of FSD, Tesla has been systematically advancing the plan to cancel the radar. In May 2021, Tesla decided to cancel the millimeter wave radar sensor of the North American version of the 2021 Model 3 and Model Y, and its assisted driving system will use pure visual recognition. Since then, on the Tesla North America official website display page, the FSD introduction has only retained the visual and ultrasonic sensor parts, and the previous millimeter wave radar performance display has been removed. Some Tesla owners have since discovered that their vehicles’ radar systems had been unplugged during repairs. Tesla acknowledged the change in its announcement, but said: "Autopilot and active safety features that use front-facing radar sensor data have been converted to use camera data Tesla Vision, making front-facing radar unnecessary." Tesla In the autonomous driving technology route, the company has extremely firmly and confidently chosen a purely visual solution, which provides sufficient conceptual support for their subtraction of removing radar sensors from vehicles.

Tesla is planning to go “radar” and switch active safety features to the camera-based Tesla Vision system. Tesla's approach has caused a dispute over technical lines in the industry. Some experts believe that although cameras can provide high-resolution images and more accurate data, radar sensors can work in different weather conditions, such as rain, fog and Night and so on. Therefore, vehicles without radar may face more risks and challenges, especially in complex environments. Afterwards, many U.S. agencies responded one after another, stating that they would no longer endorse the safety of some Tesla models.

However, Tesla insists on making constant reductions: greatly compressing the production and manufacturing process, reducing testing links, etc., to reduce costs. Moreover, Musk has publicly denounced lidar (high cost) many times and firmly supports purely visual perception solutions. Musk firmly believes that radar is an outdated technology and not suitable for autonomous driving. He said Tesla’s goal is to achieve “pure vision” autonomous driving.

Still, Tesla hasn't completely ditched radar, which has long been considered an important part of Tesla's advanced driver assistance systems. In October 2014, radar was added to all Tesla models as part of the Autopilot hardware suite. "The most important upgrade to Autopilot will be the use of more advanced signal processing to use onboard radar to generate an image of the world." For a long time, radar has been a supplementary sensor to the main camera and image processing system of Tesla vehicles. Never completely removed.

The sensor suite designed by Tesla Model 3 includes "8 cameras, 1 millimeter wave radar and 12 ultrasonic radars." Cameras and ultrasonic radars are distributed around the car body, and the millimeter-wave radar is located on the front bumper. The relevant information is as follows:

The new Tesla Model 3 seems to be determined to be the "terminator" of the appeasement plan. There are various indications that the new Tesla Model 3’s plan to completely eliminate radar should be a fact. This is not only consistent with Tesla’s autonomous driving concept of pure visual navigation, but also consistent with Tesla’s goal of completely realizing FSD (fully autonomous driving) within the year. Match the planned time point. By then, the new Tesla Model 3 may be Tesla's historic model carrying pure visual navigation FSD.