Tesla’s radar-less cars investigated by NHTSA after complaints spike | Hacker News Reader

Tesla’s radar-less cars investigated by NHTSA after complaints spike

arstechnica.com

26 pointsgnicholas12 comments

If the options were "sell car without radar and be forced to recall it and add radar a year later" or "don't sell cars at all because there are no radars available", then I think I see why they picked the first one.

Vision rather than radar AEB isn't that uncommon though is it? My cheap Suzuki uses stereo cameras for AEB, and it was touted as a pro by the used car salesman as it can detect stationary objects (which radar-based AEB can't).

Sounds like Tesla needs to tune theirs better but that can be done in a software update, I'm not sure I buy the "they were fools for removing the radar hardware!" since when the radar hardware didn't prevent Teslas from running into stationary hardware they were lambasted for that as well.

Subaru also uses a similar stereo camera sensor for their AEB.

How well does that system work? I test drove a vehicle a couple years ago and found it to be mediocre at lane-centering, much worse than the few Teslas I've ridden in.

I've never actually needed the automatic emergency braking so can't say how well it works. The dynamic cruise control works pretty well and will brake when necessary to maintain a safe following distance. But if you're driving on a freeway in the slow lane and the car ahead takes an exit then EyeSight sometimes gets confused and thinks the other car is still in your lane. So it brakes when it shouldn't until the other car moves further off.

If you can get your car to beep at you when an object is close in front of you (either by being in reverse or by pressing a button to turn it on) your car is equipped with radar.

Yeah it doesn’t do that from stationary. I’ll only beep if I’m going full speed at a fence or something (like at a 90 degree corner).

No parking sensors either. It has a 360 degree overhead parking camera view for parking though.

Parking sensors use sonar.

Radar not being able to detect stationary objects is a weird half myth. Car manufacturers disable AEB at high speeds and program it to ignore stationary objects but not because the radar can't detect objects that aren't moving. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/06/why-emergency-braking-s...

Musk has done great things, but he's wrong about vision alone being good enough. The assertion that humans use vision alone to drive is nice marketing, but not good enginnering. Vision is easily fooled. Lidar and radar provide very valuable information, especially in emergency situations, and ensuring failsafes can be implemented.

I wonder why they didn’t disable radar for a few weeks in existing cars before actually removing them form new cars.

Probably Tesla will be able to patch it with software update. Good test to vision only FSD.

There's speculation that supply chain issues forced their hand in removing radar, so it's likely something they had to do in order to keep moving cars. This was likely a rush job. Imagine killing radar on existing cars in a rushed manner.

They shipped cars without USB ports up front for a few weeks.

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