Tesla’s move away from radars to camera based-systems for its semi-autonomous driving tech was made by CEO Elon Musk – despite concerns from senior engineers about an increase in crashes predicted by the change.
Tesla engineers feared CEO Elon Musk’s decision to remove high-tech radars from the company’s electric cars and replace them with cameras would lead to a higher risk of crashes with its semi-autonomous driving systems, according to overseas reports.
US publication The Washington Post reports the request to ditch the Tesla’s radar technology – used to operate the car’s advanced driver assistance systems – and replace it with a camera-based system was ordered by Mr Musk, despite objections from the company’s engineers.
In May 2021, the US car giant introduced ‘Tesla Vision’ in its North American models – consisting of a camera suite rather than radar sensors – before rolling out the camera-based technology in its Australian-delivered Model 3s and Model Ys built in China from June 2022.
While the relatively high costs of radar sensors compared to a camera-based system was attributed as the main reason behind the switch, Mr Musk believed cameras and computers would act more like a human’s eyes and brains which roads are designed for.
“There’s no question in my mind that with a pure vision solution, we can make a car that is dramatically safer than the average person,” Mr Musk told Tesla investors in a quarterly earnings call two years ago.
“When your vision works, it works better than the best human because it’s like having eight cameras, it’s like having eyes in the back of your head, beside your head, and has three eyes of different focal distances looking forward. This is — and processing it at a speed that is superhuman.”
However, several former Tesla engineers – speaking under the condition of anonymity – told The Washington Post they were worried the radarless system would be “susceptible to basic perception errors if the cameras were obscured by raindrops or even bright sunlight, problems that could lead to crashes.”
Despite their objections, Mr Musk overruled the engineers and requested Tesla Vision’s roll-out – which included disabling the radar systems already fitted to existing cars on the road.
The Washington Post claims Tesla’s camera-based system is far less sophisticated than the radar and lidar technology used by other car-makers, despite Mr Musk stating on multiple occasions radar (and lidar) sensors are not necessary to deliver full autonomous driving.
Brad Templeton, an autonomous car developer who was formerly employed by Google for its self-driving car project, told The Washington Post about the advantages of using lidar technology compared to a camera-based system.
“One of the key advantages of lidar is that it will never fail to see a train or truck, even if it doesn’t know what it is,” said Mr Templeton. “It (lidar) knows there is an object in front and the vehicle can stop without knowing more than that.”
By contrast, the cameras need to be “told” about what an object is, requiring software engineers to label the images which are recorded in order for the car’s computer to understand what is on the road around it.
Research conducted by The Washington Post shows the number of reported instances of “phantom braking” from Tesla owners – where a car unexpectedly slams the brakes, having perceived a non-existent obstacle ahead – significantly increased after the radars were disabled and Tesla Vision was introduced.
Data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) shows there were 107 complaints of phantom braking across a three-month period after Tesla Vision was introduced. For context, there were just 34 reports for the same issue in the 22 months prior.
In December 2022, just 18 months after Tesla Vision was first rolled out in the US, a submission to the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulator showed the electric-car giant was going to backflip on its decision to ditch radar sensors from its cars in January 2023.
Tesla has also recently faced a recall of more than 363,000 vehicles equipped with its semi-autonomous technology – marketed as ‘Full Self-Driving’ – in the US, following a number of near-misses attributed to the autonomous driving system.
The NHTSA recall notice said Tesla’s autonomous driving system “may allow the vehicle to act unsafe around intersections, such as travelling straight through an intersection while in a turn-only lane, entering a stop sign-controlled intersection without coming to a complete stop, or proceeding into an intersection during a steady yellow traffic signal without due caution.”
Earlier this week, Tesla began to roll-out an over-the-air wifi update to the affected vehicles, providing a fix for the faults listed in the NHTSA recall, among other improvements for the system.
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