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Comment by TameAntelope | Hacker News Reader

I'm having trouble figuring out if this is just another battle in Elon's War with Regulators, if this is NHTSA being too slow to keep up with evolving technology, or if Teslas without radar are actually worse, deserving the loss of these designations.

Or what the mix is of all three of those things, I guess.

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NHTSA tested Tesla cars that had radar modules. Tesla has decided to remove the radar modules and use only vision systems. The new vision-only models are not NHTSA certified yet, so the NHTSA had to clarify that the safety certification only applies to vehicles shipped before the vision-only transition. That is, any vehicle with radar is still certified, but the new vehicles will apparently ship untested.

Thank for the clarification, this makes perfect sense.

It sounds from reading the article like existing cars with the radar are also losing the features though, to be replaced by camera-based solutions? (I assume to keep consistent with newer models on the road without the radar).

I may be reading it wrong - happy to be corrected.

The story I read on this was new cars losing features until their vision-only equivalents show up

And it is possible to meet NHTSA certification requirements for recommended safety technology with vision-only systems. Subaru has done that for years.

Doesn’t Subaru use stereo vision though? Having depth cues and not having them seems like a pretty big distinction, and Tesla just removed their only source of depth.

Tesla has multiple cameras on the front.

See: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a36542541/tesla-model-3-mo...

Multiple cameras don’t equate to stereo though. As I understand it, the Tesla cameras have too little overlap and the distortion is too great to do proper stereo - it’s 100% monocular depth estimation.

They don't seem very far apart in the Tesla..

https://st.motortrend.com/uploads/sites/5/2017/07/Tesla-Mode...

The Subaru cameras are either side of the mirror, probably much more effective for stereo vision.

Subaru Eyesight cameras look different though, they’re further apart. See https://images.app.goo.gl/vAJJ7JuV1cmTaymA8

They won't know that it meets the requirements until it has been tested, so putting this clarification out in the meantime covers the gap until vision-only testing has completed.

Teslas are basically just overpriced knockoff Subarus that don't actually work properly. The independent testing data has shown this for years, e.g.: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a24511826/safety-featu...

I’m usually one to not like over regulation.

Radar / no radar is a pretty drastic change though.

I wouldn't even consider this regulation. This is organisation A asking org B to review their product and put a sticker on it that it passed the tests. Then org A decides to make a different product, so org B clarifies that the new product is not the one they tested and certified.

This would still go the same way if org B wasn't a government org.

This is it, period. You make a new vehicle, you have to go through the certification again, common sense tbh.

There's all sorts of rumors for why Elon / Tesla is doing this. The most probable rumor IMO is that the chip-shortage has hit the Tesla radar especially hard.

Instead of idling plants (like other automakers https://www.autonews.com/manufacturing/ford-idles-f-150-plan...), Tesla decided to cut out the radar entirely.

That means cars can be produced, and sold, without these radars / chips.

Tesla has been pushing camera-only autonomous driving (ditching LIDAR) since well before the chip shortage. I would assume this is part of the same drive.

Tesla did not ditch LIDAR, they never actually used it (not in production cars at least?).

Tesla is ditching radar, not lidar.

As of May 2021, Tesla publicly announced they’re using lidar to develop FSD.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/24/22451404/tesla-luminar-li...

This might be for improving their camera-based vision system by collecting both camera inputs and accurate ground-truth data via LIDAR to train the system with.

They haven’t announced anything like that - they’re just using LiDAR rigs to validate data from their vision based approach, particularly distance. It actually even mentions something about it at the bottom of the article you referenced.

My claim:

> they’re using lidar to develop FSD.

Your comment:

> they’re just using LiDAR rigs to validate data from their vision based approach

In 2019, Elon called lidar a crutch:

https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/22/anyone-relying-on-lidar-is...

No public announcement. They merely have some lidar equipment for testing. I'd be shocked if they haven't already had lidar units for years. After all, you can't compare your approach to lidar if you don't have a lidar unit to compare to.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210312022048/https://www.tesla...

I'm pulling this from archive.org, because Tesla has removed this blogpost from their servers.

As recently as March, they kept this pro-Radar blogpost up. Only now are they purging this data from their archives. Fortunately, the Internet Archive remembers the history, so they won't find it so easy to rewrite history in their favor.

Pretty sure they can have it wiped from the archive as well so if you want to hold on to it better do it somewhere else.

That post is from 2016. From an engineering blog.

Do you really expect, or even want, companies to go back and purge all old engineering blogs which they now disagree with? By calling out an old post as evidence that they are "pro-lidar", you're the one forcing companies to try to curate the public history of their development process.

That's not healthy. Don't do that.

It’s radar, not lidar, and the point is that Tesla thought the post was contradictory enough to remove it, while all the other content from 2016 is still there.

That seems incredibly blatant, given that all the other posts from 2016 are still available.

You meant March 2016? I would not call that recent in the self-driving vehicle world

https://www.tesla.com/blog/upgrading-autopilot-seeing-world-...

Sometime between March 2021 and May 2021 (today), Tesla has deleted this blogpost. The above link is now a dead-link. I've included the original blogpost from archive.org in my earlier post, so that you can see the original content.

My expectation is for Tesla to be honest about their history, and not be ones who delete inconvenient blogposts years later. This selective picking-and-choosing of historical posts is immediately suspect, and extremely damaging to the reputation of the Tesla blog.

In any case, the _timing_ of this deletion event tells us everything. Tesla only recently began thinking about Tesla Vision seriously, which provides evidence that this is a temporary supply chain issue, as opposed to a forward looking technological innovation.

Deleted, not posted.

This is the kind of shenanigans that a software company would pull. On the surface it seems like a great business decision from Tesla.

My read is it's just the NHTSA not granting a certification for things it hasn't tested. Ie, "forward collision warning, lane departure warning, crash imminent braking and dynamic brake support" without radar. Tesla will release the new versions (if they haven't already), the NHTSA will test the new models, and they'll grant the "check marks" again.

In other words, it's non-news (unless you happen to be planning to buy a Tesla this week).

> Tesla will release the new versions (if they haven't already), the NHTSA will test the new models, and they'll grant the "check marks" again.

Shouldn't this operate in the other direction?

Vehicle manufacturer supplies model for testing, regulator either approves it gives manufacturer opportunity to fix then retest?

Pretty sure it's not a requirement for vehicles to have these safety features to go to market. So from Tesla's perspective this is better that delaying their product that they think is equivalent (though in my mind they're taking a risk.)

I see, thanks.

Bear in mind, there are safety features actually being dropped for this change: https://www.tesla.com/support/transitioning-tesla-vision

"Emergency Lane Departure Avoidance may be disabled at delivery"

At delivery. Sounds like a software update waiting. Lane depature would be a pure vision based thing anyway, as radar can't detect lane markings.

Who is buying a car with features that "may be disabled"?

Despite the occasional media spin, Musk isn't waging a war with regulators (the way some well-known startups are). He had a spat with SEC over his dumb Twitter shenanigans, but other than that, AFAIK, both Tesla and SpaceX are mostly on friendly terms with regulators. In particular, NHTSA ratings were always a strong marketing angle for Tesla.

Well they’re not removing radar on 3/Y in Europe…

> The agency said it "only includes check marks for the model production range for the vehicles tested."

It seems pretty clear to me that the NHTSA just hasn't tested this version, so it won't certify them.

they removed radar because of the chip shortage and now even more people will die from auto kill.

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