TECH: Tesla Ditches Ultrasonic Sensors In favor of Camera System

Tes­la has announced that it will phase out the ultra­son­ic sen­sor (USS) for short-range obsta­cle detec­tion installed in elec­tric vehi­cles, Elec­trek reports.

While oth­er automak­ers use sen­sors such as LiDAR and radar rather than cam­eras, Elon Mask’s com­pa­ny is par­tic­u­lar about using only cam­eras for the dri­ving sup­port sys­tem “Tes­la Vision”.

We plan to remove ultra­son­ic sen­sors from our Mod­el 3 and Mod­el Y vehi­cles in the com­ing months and phase out ultra­son­ic sen­sors from our Mod­el S and Mod­el X mod­els by 2023. Tes­la says it will be used pri­mar­i­ly for park­ing and short-range col­li­sion warning.

As a result of this change, some func­tions such as Park Assist, which warns of sur­round­ing obsta­cles at speeds of 5 km/h or less, Auto Park, Salmon, and Smart Salmon, will be lim­it­ed or unavail­able on new­er vehi­cles with­out the USS.

These fea­tures will be brought back via an over-the-air update “in the near future” once they work as well on cam­era-only sys­tems. We do not believe this change will affect the crash safe­ty rat­ing of these vehicles.

Last year, Tes­la began phas­ing out radar sen­sors and adopt­ing Vision Autopi­lot. At the time, he tweet­ed, “Vision is much more accu­rate (than radar).”

And last year, The New York Times report­ed that Musk had pre­vi­ous­ly told employ­ees, “If humans can dri­ve cars with only binoc­u­lar vision, so should machines.”

But the safe­ty advan­tage appears to have been lost, as Tes­la’s radar was able to detect a poten­tial crash “two cars ahead” where the dri­ver could not see it.

And when radar was dis­con­tin­ued, a series of “phan­tom brak­ing” acci­dents, in which the sys­tem mis­tak­en­ly thought the car was about to hit some­thing, prompt­ed an NHTSA investigation.