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Tesla Vision Update: Replacing Ultrasonic Sensors with Tesla Vision

204 points by dagmx 4y ago

mukundmr 4y ago
My rear view camera regularly gets covered with dirt and grime after a highway run during the monsoons. The car has both camera and radar so that I can have reliable assistance while reversing. With this experience in mind I fail to see how Tesla’s camera-only move is reliable for the use cases that they have mentioned.
- joewadcan 4y ago
  Tesla cameras have sizeable overlap, so if one is obstructed it tries to extract the information from the others. If it can't then it tells you to clean the cameras. It's not perfect but it's better for them (Tesla) and hopefully better long term for all Tesla owners
  - dagmx 4y ago
    They have some overlap but not large enough to be reliable. My B pillar is regularly blinded due to their inefficient moisture sealing (called out in their manual instead of fixing it) and sunlight. It causes it to fail to see most things to our side
    - joewadcan 4y ago
      They are reliable enough to use for FSD: https://youtu.be/hx7BXih7zx8 https://youtu.be/hx7BXih7zx8 so i think it's reliable enough for park assist, summon etc. Yeah you're def right about the moisture sealing... it's been hit or miss on production tolerances
      - dagmx 4y ago
        > They are reliable enough to use for FSD I disagree. regular navigate on autopilot and the FSD Beta are still very flakey outside of pristine conditions for me. At this point, I either am expecting Tesla to go ahead with a camera upgrade with an expensive retrofit in the future, or FSD will never fully realize.
    - YeBanKo 4y ago
      If only one camera sees an object, then they can’t use parallax to estimate depths.
- droopyEyelids 4y ago
  This is something that comes to mind when I see "designed in California" for a product that can't handle snow. Guess the same thing applies to monsoons!
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- mrguyorama 4y ago
  My VW hides the rear view camera under the emblem, so it isn't exposed to the elements and only flips out when in use. It's brilliant, at least as long as the motor that flips the emblem holds up.
JoshGlazebrook 4y ago
“In the near future, once these features achieve performance parity to today’s vehicles” Right... like how vision vehicles have parity with autopilot speeds and following distance? Oh wait they don't. Vision-only vehicles are still limited to a max of 85mph and 2 car minimum following distance for autosteer while radar is 90mph and 1 car following distance. Texas has 85mph highways. The two car following distance constantly leads to cars cutting in-between you and the car in front of you because the gap is so large. edit: Just to clarify, when it says "1 car length", the car adjusts the amount of space depending on speed. So its not literally just one car length.
- itstomkent 4y ago
  Dude if you are going 85-90 miles an hour and you aren't leaving AT LEAST 2 cars in between you, please stay off the road. You should be keeping 3 seconds of distance between you and the car in front of you. At 90 miles per hour that's a hell of a lot more than 2 car lengths.
  - yupper32 4y ago
    It's possible they didn't mean at the same time. Minimum 1 in all situations, including going 5mph in traffic, where 2 might be a bit conservative.
    - saurik 4y ago
      Yeah: driving with a 2-car gap in stop-and-go traffic is NOT normal.
  - joewadcan 4y ago
    Agreed. "Parity" doesn't mean in all cases, it means in the majority of cases and this seems like a edge case (where 2 car lengths isn't good enough).
  - JoshGlazebrook 4y ago
    Just to clarify, when it says "1 car length", the car adjusts the amount of space depending on speed. So its not literally just one car length.
olliecornelia 4y ago
Wow, how fucking stupid. Does that mean that cars that already have ultrasonic sensors (and radar modules) will stop using that sensor data?
- joewadcan 4y ago
  They specifically call that out in the doc. "At this time, we do not plan to remove the functionality of ultrasonic sensors in our existing fleet."
  - dagmx 4y ago
    However they said the same for radar and removed it regardless after some time.
    - joewadcan 4y ago
      Yeah i think that's probably gonna happen here too, hence their "at this time" language.
- mlajtos 4y ago
  The reason why they decided to remove ultrasonics is that combining contradictory signals from cameras and ultrasonic is not straightforward. What should have the higher precedence? So they ultimately decided that cameras can do what ultrasonics can do, but even better. They won't remove ultrasonics from the delivered cars, but they will probably disable them in coming months.
  - williamcotton 4y ago
    An autonomous vehicle is operating on a road network designed for humans with eyes. If we are aiming for the kind of “common sense” required for parity with a human driver it seems intuitive that the vehicle would have sensory inputs in common.
    - Kon-Peki 4y ago
Kon-Peki 4y ago
Does this change make FSD required, or is it still "optional"?
- joewadcan 4y ago
  FSD is just the software component, so it doesn't change anything. FSD is still optional
sxates 4y ago
Cars delivered today without USS will not have: "Park Assist: alerts you of surrounding objects when the vehicle is traveling <5 mph." (among other features like Summon) This is the most basic feature that almost every car has had for years - but not your $60k Model Y. Why can't they wait to remove sensors until they've achieved feature parity with the vision only system? This seems crazy. I don't really understand the push to do everything through the cameras. This has caused other problems too - like their decision to control automatic wipers with just the camera. Which meant in my Model 3, the automatic wipers were erratic and ineffective while in every other car with a normal $5 rain sensor the feature worked great.
- joewadcan 4y ago
  Because if the hardware isn't available they can't deliver the car and recognize the revenue. They can wait, but if they're gonna remove it anyway it lets them make more cars with less costs in shorter time. Seems logical if it is indeed parity.
- drcongo 4y ago
- phire 4y ago
  It's most likely a hardware availablity issue. They have run out of sensors, and they don't want to pause production until they have produced more.
  - pstuart 4y ago
    Seems like the "upstanding" thing to do would be to ship without (and credit for the omission) and offer free retrofit once available.
    - langsoul-com 4y ago
      That would be an extreme logistical and costly nightmare. Tesla doesn't operate the dealership model, which all tend to double up as a service station. So it's far more difficult for customers to get to the telsa service stations. Since there's less, that also means they'd be insane waits when the product comes back in.
conradev 4y ago
It is crazy to me that these cars are always recording and streaming the result to Tesla. Sure, that data might be good for training self-driving cars, but also a lotttt of other things.
- fckgw 4y ago
  They are absolutely not streaming the data to Tesla in real-time. They are storing some data on-board to retrieve later which makes it convenient for them to deflect blame in crashes.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    Yeah - there's an interior, driving-facing camera(at least in the model Y), which I suspect has no real purpose other than to send video after a crash to Tesla, so they can say "look, the driver wasn't staring at the road, not our fault autopilot crashed them". I would cover it up, but I'm afraid that it will look incriminating if I ever am in an accident as to why I did it.
    - eclipxe 4y ago
      The camera ensures you are paying attention with using Autopilot or FSD. For example if you pick up your phone, it will alert you to pay attention and eventually shut off.
      - bink 4y ago
        I own a 2019 model 3 and the last I heard was that they couldn't use those cameras for monitoring a driver's attention because they were intended for monitoring the cabin when you "rented out" your FSD vehicle, so they aren't aimed at the driver. Have they changed the orientation since then?
        kgc 4y ago
        2018 models do monitor the driver so yours should too when on FSD.
STRML 4y ago
There are multiple tells that this move, just like the removal of radar, is supply-chain and cost-driven and not actually driven by engineering. If this were a planned move, the software would already be ready to replace it. It is not. Cars without radar still aren't at parity with the car that have it, although they "fixed" this a few weeks back by simply turning off the radar on the older cars. The parking sensors on the Tesla are really good and very useful. They show a rough outline of what is around you and are displayed very nicely compared to some other cars. It is a real shame to remove this, and downright dishonest to characterize it as some kind of leap forward. The cheapest bargain-bin cars have this feature. Your $100k+ Model S or X will not. Even more concerning: some features simply cannot be replaced by camera. Tesla infamously does not have a front bumper camera, making it impossible to detect obstructions occluded from view by the hood. For 3/S, which are low, this means it will be impossible to detect low obstructions like too-high concrete wheel stops and similar obstructions. Once the hood has occluded the view from the windshield cameras, these obstructions will cease to exist. Laughable that this is being done on cars from a high-end brand, and that the remedy for customers who are getting worse cars today than you would get yesterday is to wait for these features to "be restored" at some indeterminate time in the future.
- deleted 4y ago
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- drcross 4y ago
  When you have a several month wait list for your product, legions of devoted potential customers, if you're head and shoulders above any of your competitors, you're able to get away with things like this.
  - hansonkd13 4y ago
    > if you're head and shoulders above any of your competitors, you're able to get away with things like this. The hubris of Tesla is still believing this to be the case. I personally cancelled my cybertruck order from lack of interest. better competition exists in 2022 that wasn’t the case years ago.
modeless 4y ago
This would potentially work... if the cameras could see the places where the ultrasonic sensors were. But they can't! There are big blind spots near the bumpers. I guess they are planning to just have the car fill in the blind spots by remembering what it saw from other perspectives? But that only works when the car is moving and can't account for small obstacles that can move unpredictably, like animals or toddlers. I'm sympathetic to the idea that it's possible to drive a car with just cameras, but the specific cameras that Tesla has aren't good enough. They need more coverage, better quality, and self-cleaning.
- valine 4y ago
  I assume these new Teslas will have a bumper camera. No way they’re planning to rely on memory.
  - yreg 4y ago
    In that case they would need to maintain software for both loadouts or install additional camera to the cars they shipped up until now.
  - modeless 4y ago
    They don't: https://old.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/y3ymsr/2023_model_3_without_uss/ https://old.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/y3ymsr/2023_mo...
davewritescode 4y ago
This is typical Tesla. Tell you they're giving you a great new feature when in reality they've made the product worse.
atonse 4y ago
I have had a model 3 for four years and the autopilot has steadily gotten worse. In summer 2019 we went on a road trip that was 10 hours of total driving (each way), where I actually drove for maybe 30 mins total. It was flawless and downright magical. Since then we often have the car slam brakes out of the blue (once waking up my sleeping family and causing both kids to cry), and a few other times. I have lost trust with the autopilot system. It’s that simple. And I LOVE my model 3, the supercharger network, all else. I don’t know what’s going on over there but I am not remotely convinced that they have their act together with vision-only based autonomous driving.
- WXLCKNO 4y ago
  I drove a new M3 in Germany last week and was blown away by how well the assisted driving features worked. Below 60 kmh it also allows you to never touch the steering wheel while on the highway in a traffic jam. For my purposes it seemed superior to the current Tesla system and after watching some comparison videos, my conclusion seemed accurate.
  - dagmx 4y ago
    In your sentence are you referring to a BMW M3? Since Tesla also have an M3 (edit: albeit abbreviated) I was a tad confused by your second paragraph
    - aaomidi 4y ago
      Tesla is technically Model 3, not M3
      - dagmx 4y ago
        It is but a lot of folks shorten it to M3 as well.
        KerrAvon 4y ago
        A knowledgeable car person will never, ever call the Model 3 an M3.
rootusrootus 4y ago
This does not make me optimistic for Tesla's future. Unless this is truly a temporary thing due to a supply shortage and they are planning to return to normal when they can. Tesla's track record is poor. They cheaped out on a few dollars for an IR rain sensor like everyone else uses, and as a result the wipers on a Model 3 are psychotic. Combine that with their hatred for manual controls, and I had a terrible experience every winter when the rains really started. Now they don't have radar, which everyone else does. AFAIK they still haven't got that reliable IR sensor. No CarPlay yet, which 99% of all other cars have. No 360 degree camera view. No ultrasonic parking sensors. Why again would I buy another Tesla? The competition has more features. The cherry on top is Tesla's demonstrated willingness to screw over their customers well after the sale, and not even for the benefit of the company. Just because they hate their customers, I guess. That alone is a deal killer for me now.
- LightG 4y ago
  These all look like push factors and are serious enough on their own. But I don't even need them. I'm pulled by Hyundai. Their recent design language has me and I'd argue they have the better all around packages. Personally, Telsa aren't even the top dog anymore. It'll take time for others to see it.
  - dahfizz 4y ago
    I agree that Hyundai is killing it, and I will seriously consider the ioniq 6 when it is available. However, I don't think you can discount Tesla here. They produce ~ 5x more model 3's than Hyundai can produce ioniq 5's. And the Tesla battery / motor specs are much better. I don't see any real competition for Tesla at their price point, specs, and production capabilities. Which is frustrating, because I want an EV but I will not buy a Tesla.
    - KerrAvon 4y ago
      Which price point? Lots of non-Tesla EVs selling for a wide range of price points right now. Totally with you on the Ioniq 6 — very attractive, and will have better service options should something go wrong. Would also consider Polestar 2. Maybe the Ford Mustang Mach-E. Maybe.
diebeforei485 4y ago
I'm not entirely sure this is a good idea. But their removal of radar seems to have gone okay, so perhaps they've done their calibration tests and know this can be done.
CivBase 4y ago
> Will vehicles equipped with ultrasonic sensors have their functionality removed? > At this time, we do not plan to remove the functionality of ultrasonic sensors in our existing fleet. I really really do not like the use of the phrase "our existing fleet" here. It heavily implies that Tesla has some level of ownership over the vehicles they sell post-purchase.
- salil999 4y ago
  They do though! They can easily disable features like Autopilot, Autopark, Summon, etc fleetwide in a snap if they wanted to.
  - simondotau 4y ago
    Legally, I'm pretty sure they couldn't. Technically, this is true for any product which has a pathway for software updates. Arguably this includes nearly all models of car on sale today, which can have their software updated — even if the process is more cumbersome. The key difference is that a Tesla vehicle can conveniently perform comprehensive whole-of-car updates while it's sitting in your garage, whereas many other cars can only have some systems updated during a service visit. Regardless, I don't see how software updates being convenient could serve as the defining criteria for a manufacturer having "ownership over the vehicles they sell".
    - AlexandrB 4y ago
      > Legally, I'm pretty sure they couldn't. Somewhat related question: do Teslas have a EULA or other agreement on purchase? And if so, does it include an arbitration clause?
      - simondotau 4y ago
        I’m saying they couldn’t do it because it’s a safety related feature of a heavily safety-regulated product category. I don’t think any EULA could override that.
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Ninjinka 4y ago
Geohot was right. Tweet re: LIDAR, but still: "When this delusion ends and all these companies fold, it won't be LIDAR vs. Or ride sharing vs. None of this matters. All that matters is building an intelligent machine. Self driving is 100% a software problem. Given software written by God, a smartphone can drive a car." https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/1577045884159676416?s=20&t=5aVypqn7XE8lC6L4nyVuBg https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/1577045884159676416?s=20...
- 015a 4y ago
  Musk has said similar things in the past; that cars should be able to do everything human drivers can do with only vision, because that's all human drivers have (discounting the far more minor sensory inputs like sound and touch). I find that take fascinating. Its, in effect, saying "well, computer hardware and the human brain are similar enough; the human brain just got an evolutionary headstart on its software, so once we solve that we're golden". Not only is there no evidence to support this conclusion; its trivial to recognize that the human brain and computers operate differently, at a fundamental, logical level. The brain has no transistors. It doesn't care about XOR or solid state memory. There is literally no part of the human brain which even remotely resembles any internal part of a computer; not remotely. Why is it so accepted that this problem can be solved in software? Or, maybe: it can be solved, but it will take so much computing power that any computer which could solve it in real time couldn't fit in or be powered by a car? Virtualizing linux on my Windows PC incurs a double-digit percentage performance penalty, and that's on the same ISA; what is the human brain's ISA? AI is an emulation of human behavior; what is it's performance penalty? Are we just surfing Moore's Law hoping to outrun it? I just find the hubris of his statement baffling; that we, meaning Our Scientific Community, literally does not completely understand why or how acetaminophen works to alleviate pain in the human brain; yet they and Musk are wholly confident that given the same inputs their software can emulate the human brain's outputs. I'll commit this to the public record, and feel free to revisit in ten years; if a synthetic brain system ever hits performance parity with the human brain in a task like driving or consciousness, it will be running on hardware that looks nothing like what I'm typing on. I suspect that even calling it "hardware", with emphasis on the word "hard", will seem antiquated. Maybe self driving is 100% a software problem; but the brain doesn't really differentiate.
bearjaws 4y ago
This will absolutely not work, I have FSD and it messes up distance of large well defined objects, think about how this will work with a concrete wall, or curbs that it can probably no longer see. When I pull into my garage sometimes it recognizes my shelf as a car ON FSD....
- valine 4y ago
  The output of the “occupancy network” isn’t displayed to the user right now. It doesn’t do classification, it’s just raw voxels. The real bummer is that without ultra sonics the car can’t see the ground in front of it. Hopefully tesla adds a bumper camera.
  - flutas 4y ago
    > The output of the “occupancy network” isn’t displayed to the user right now. I may be mis-understanding, or experiencing something else but I think it is if you're on FSD. It shows up as grey (elevated) regions around the visuals, not the standard "not a road" grey. The gates for my community began showing up in this update with it, but they look like about 2-3ft tall triangles, not a gate... though still recognized I guess?
    - simondotau 4y ago
      As stated by Tesla just a few days ago, the occupancy network is not currently shown in the customer-facing visualisation. (Some unrecognised objects are represented by generic placeholders. This is derived from, but not the output of, the occupancy network.) This video links to the relevant citation, and if you continue watching for around ten seconds you can see examples of the occupancy network visualised: https://youtu.be/ODSJsviD_SU?t=4337 https://youtu.be/ODSJsviD_SU?t=4337
      - flutas 4y ago
        I don't think it will ever be shown as "raw data" like that though. They will most likely only show the current street view, with cars and unknown objects that are in the road.
vzaliva 4y ago
As an engineer, I see little value in removing any sensors. No matter how noisy or limited they are, they bring additional information which, if processed, could improve overall accuracy. This is commonly referred to as "sensor fusion". So this is probably is purely cost-saving move. While I understand how radar could be expensive, I am not sure the saving on much cheaper ultrasound sensors is worth the loss of additional information about the environment. As Telsa Model 3 owner, I can attest that their automatic parking rarely works anyway. They should be adding more sensors to improve it, not remove them.
- victor22 4y ago
  this seems like a major downgrade disguised as questionable upgrade
- kypro 4y ago
  I've worked on 3d vision systems before and have experimented using different types of sensors in multi-sensor setups, and I'd argue that overwhelmingly it's a software problem. More sensors help, but passed a point it's extremely marginal, plus you're throwing the majority of the raw data away anyway. I do agree though - assuming processing power isn't a performance bottleneck here, more data is always better. But there's a reason humans only have two eyes and not three or four, for example. Two eyes are really all you need.
  - macrolime 4y ago
    Completely off topic, but there's a fascinating list of animals with more than two eyes. For example the four eyed fish which uses one pair of eyes to see below water and one pair to see above water, when it's swimming along the surface. https://wildlifeinformer.com/animals-with-more-than-2-eyes/ https://wildlifeinformer.com/animals-with-more-than-2-eyes/
  - creshal 4y ago
    > More sensors help, but passed a point it's extremely marginal, plus you're throwing the majority of the raw data away anyway. Unless other sensors break, then they're suddenly useful redundancy. In a safety critical product like this, that alone should preclude the removal of sensors. > But there's a reason humans only have two eyes and not three or four, for example. Two eyes are really all you need. You still get two, both for depth sensing and for redundancy; and some animals like spiders have 6-8 eyes.
pavlov 4y ago
As a Tesla customer I’m so used to being constantly gaslighted that it’s a pleasant surprise when they’re only removing features from new cars rather than my existing one.
- yreg 4y ago
  Just wait until they stop supporting our legacy ultrasonics in software.
ultrahax 4y ago
When parking in tight spaces, getting exact-distance feedback from the ultrasonic sensors is pretty handy. I can't see how vision will replace that; I don't think any of the cameras can see that close to the bumper.
01100011 4y ago
Does anyone else think they're running out of compute power on their DL computer and trying to eliminate sensor fusion in order to preserve precious cycles for vision processing? I've long wondered if TSLA screwed up by choosing the hardware before fully solving the problem, leaving millions of vehicles incapable of performing safe FSD without HW upgrades.
- macrolime 4y ago
  It does seem rather underpowered if you compare it with the requirements of state of the art Deep Learning models in other areas, not an apples and oranges comparison though.
socialismisok 4y ago
This reads strongly like, "we're losing, badly, and we hope this will buy enough runway for us to figure things out before we've lost completely." I genuinely don't know why anyone would buy into Tesla now.
- potatochup 4y ago
  How does this indicate that they are losing? In what regard? They certainly aren't losing on being a money making enterprise, before or after this change. Or did you mean w.r.t. having autonomous cars? I don't see how adding more work will buy runway...
  - socialismisok 4y ago
    When leadership sees numbers going in the wrong direction, they squeeze everywhere they can. Often this means making poor long term or poor engineering decisions in hopes they can squeeze some short term gain. What I see, from decades of being an engineer, is a company making a bad decision probably to cut costs. Why would Tesla need to cut costs? Something isn't working out correctly.
    - simondotau 4y ago
      There's no evidence that Tesla has a unit cost problem. If anything the opposite is true. Tesla has significantly higher automotive margins than all mainstream competitors, despite producing 100% EVs with large expensive lithium battery packs. While their competitors mostly produce mature, highly cost optimised ICE vehicles. The result is that Tesla has insane amounts of cash on hand and record-breaking profits, despite rapidly constructing/expanding three factories on three continents.
      - socialismisok 4y ago
        It's not the unit cost that's the problem. The unit cost decrease is a patch that can buy time to address eg an engineering cost problem, or a "we're going to need to buy bigger chips soon to get this to work" problem.
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Strong corpspeak here, where they sell you the removal of a feature like a benefit. It's even topping Apple selling copy/paste as revolutionary.
yalogin 4y ago
This also means these sensors will be disabled at some point in older cars too. Interesting move though I am not qualified to comment on the technical merits of it
theshrike79 4y ago
I read this Somewhere(tm), if anyone can confirm it I'd be grateful: The issue with Tesla's camera only neural network thing is that it needs a TON of cycles to determine the distance of every point in the image. With LIDAR, for example, you get the direction and distance in the same datapoint without any extra calculation. And the current generation of Tesla cars are operating pretty much at the limit of their power and will run out of resources unless Tesla manages to do some crazy optimisations on their detection algorithms/neural network training.
mostertoaster 4y ago
So visual cues are replacing ultra sonic ones? I just see bats flying in these huge swarms not colliding and I’m like maybe we shouldn’t give up on ultrasonic sensors.
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philjohn 4y ago
The alternate headline should really be "Tesla FSD, but only when it's not foggy, or raining heavily".
vegardx 4y ago
Given that my Model 3 seems to think (visualized on the screen) that my garage door is a semi-trailer pointing towards me, I'm inclined to not believe that they can't do all of this with cameras only.
tibbydudeza 4y ago
Does a Tesla have a rear parking camera ???.
- yreg 4y ago
  Yes, these are the camera angles. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DFh2Vv4XUAIVStb.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DFh2Vv4XUAIVStb.jpg The main issue is that none of them sees right ahead the front bumper and they of course don't work when obstructed.
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spaetzleesser 4y ago
I am not sure if this is smart technically but from an environmental perspective I prefer cars to have passive sensors. Blasting out ultrasound and Lidar is pollution that can impact animals. Personally I think self driving cars will only work once roads are built for them with specific markers and self driving cars communicate with each other.

204 points by dagmx 4y ago

My rear view camera regularly gets covered with dirt and grime after a highway run during the monsoons. The car has both camera and radar so that I can have reliable assistance while reversing. With this experience in mind I fail to see how Tesla’s camera-only move is reliable for the use cases that they have mentioned.

joewadcan 4y ago
Tesla cameras have sizeable overlap, so if one is obstructed it tries to extract the information from the others. If it can't then it tells you to clean the cameras. It's not perfect but it's better for them (Tesla) and hopefully better long term for all Tesla owners
- dagmx 4y ago
  They have some overlap but not large enough to be reliable. My B pillar is regularly blinded due to their inefficient moisture sealing (called out in their manual instead of fixing it) and sunlight. It causes it to fail to see most things to our side
  - joewadcan 4y ago
    They are reliable enough to use for FSD: https://youtu.be/hx7BXih7zx8 https://youtu.be/hx7BXih7zx8 so i think it's reliable enough for park assist, summon etc. Yeah you're def right about the moisture sealing... it's been hit or miss on production tolerances
    - dagmx 4y ago
      > They are reliable enough to use for FSD I disagree. regular navigate on autopilot and the FSD Beta are still very flakey outside of pristine conditions for me. At this point, I either am expecting Tesla to go ahead with a camera upgrade with an expensive retrofit in the future, or FSD will never fully realize.
  - YeBanKo 4y ago
    If only one camera sees an object, then they can’t use parallax to estimate depths.
droopyEyelids 4y ago
This is something that comes to mind when I see "designed in California" for a product that can't handle snow. Guess the same thing applies to monsoons!
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mrguyorama 4y ago
My VW hides the rear view camera under the emblem, so it isn't exposed to the elements and only flips out when in use. It's brilliant, at least as long as the motor that flips the emblem holds up.

JoshGlazebrook 4y ago

“In the near future, once these features achieve performance parity to today’s vehicles” Right... like how vision vehicles have parity with autopilot speeds and following distance? Oh wait they don't. Vision-only vehicles are still limited to a max of 85mph and 2 car minimum following distance for autosteer while radar is 90mph and 1 car following distance. Texas has 85mph highways. The two car following distance constantly leads to cars cutting in-between you and the car in front of you because the gap is so large. edit: Just to clarify, when it says "1 car length", the car adjusts the amount of space depending on speed. So its not literally just one car length.

itstomkent 4y ago
Dude if you are going 85-90 miles an hour and you aren't leaving AT LEAST 2 cars in between you, please stay off the road. You should be keeping 3 seconds of distance between you and the car in front of you. At 90 miles per hour that's a hell of a lot more than 2 car lengths.
- yupper32 4y ago
  It's possible they didn't mean at the same time. Minimum 1 in all situations, including going 5mph in traffic, where 2 might be a bit conservative.
  - saurik 4y ago
    Yeah: driving with a 2-car gap in stop-and-go traffic is NOT normal.
- joewadcan 4y ago
  Agreed. "Parity" doesn't mean in all cases, it means in the majority of cases and this seems like a edge case (where 2 car lengths isn't good enough).
- JoshGlazebrook 4y ago
  Just to clarify, when it says "1 car length", the car adjusts the amount of space depending on speed. So its not literally just one car length.

olliecornelia 4y ago

Wow, how fucking stupid. Does that mean that cars that already have ultrasonic sensors (and radar modules) will stop using that sensor data?

joewadcan 4y ago
They specifically call that out in the doc. "At this time, we do not plan to remove the functionality of ultrasonic sensors in our existing fleet."
- dagmx 4y ago
  However they said the same for radar and removed it regardless after some time.
  - joewadcan 4y ago
    Yeah i think that's probably gonna happen here too, hence their "at this time" language.
mlajtos 4y ago
The reason why they decided to remove ultrasonics is that combining contradictory signals from cameras and ultrasonic is not straightforward. What should have the higher precedence? So they ultimately decided that cameras can do what ultrasonics can do, but even better. They won't remove ultrasonics from the delivered cars, but they will probably disable them in coming months.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  An autonomous vehicle is operating on a road network designed for humans with eyes. If we are aiming for the kind of “common sense” required for parity with a human driver it seems intuitive that the vehicle would have sensory inputs in common.
  - Kon-Peki 4y ago

Kon-Peki 4y ago

Does this change make FSD required, or is it still "optional"?

joewadcan 4y ago
FSD is just the software component, so it doesn't change anything. FSD is still optional

sxates 4y ago

Cars delivered today without USS will not have: "Park Assist: alerts you of surrounding objects when the vehicle is traveling <5 mph." (among other features like Summon) This is the most basic feature that almost every car has had for years - but not your $60k Model Y. Why can't they wait to remove sensors until they've achieved feature parity with the vision only system? This seems crazy. I don't really understand the push to do everything through the cameras. This has caused other problems too - like their decision to control automatic wipers with just the camera. Which meant in my Model 3, the automatic wipers were erratic and ineffective while in every other car with a normal $5 rain sensor the feature worked great.

joewadcan 4y ago
Because if the hardware isn't available they can't deliver the car and recognize the revenue. They can wait, but if they're gonna remove it anyway it lets them make more cars with less costs in shorter time. Seems logical if it is indeed parity.
drcongo 4y ago
phire 4y ago
It's most likely a hardware availablity issue. They have run out of sensors, and they don't want to pause production until they have produced more.
- pstuart 4y ago
  Seems like the "upstanding" thing to do would be to ship without (and credit for the omission) and offer free retrofit once available.
  - langsoul-com 4y ago
    That would be an extreme logistical and costly nightmare. Tesla doesn't operate the dealership model, which all tend to double up as a service station. So it's far more difficult for customers to get to the telsa service stations. Since there's less, that also means they'd be insane waits when the product comes back in.

conradev 4y ago

It is crazy to me that these cars are always recording and streaming the result to Tesla. Sure, that data might be good for training self-driving cars, but also a lotttt of other things.

fckgw 4y ago
They are absolutely not streaming the data to Tesla in real-time. They are storing some data on-board to retrieve later which makes it convenient for them to deflect blame in crashes.
- googlryas 4y ago
  Yeah - there's an interior, driving-facing camera(at least in the model Y), which I suspect has no real purpose other than to send video after a crash to Tesla, so they can say "look, the driver wasn't staring at the road, not our fault autopilot crashed them". I would cover it up, but I'm afraid that it will look incriminating if I ever am in an accident as to why I did it.
  - eclipxe 4y ago
    The camera ensures you are paying attention with using Autopilot or FSD. For example if you pick up your phone, it will alert you to pay attention and eventually shut off.
    - bink 4y ago
      I own a 2019 model 3 and the last I heard was that they couldn't use those cameras for monitoring a driver's attention because they were intended for monitoring the cabin when you "rented out" your FSD vehicle, so they aren't aimed at the driver. Have they changed the orientation since then?
      - kgc 4y ago
        2018 models do monitor the driver so yours should too when on FSD.

STRML 4y ago

There are multiple tells that this move, just like the removal of radar, is supply-chain and cost-driven and not actually driven by engineering. If this were a planned move, the software would already be ready to replace it. It is not. Cars without radar still aren't at parity with the car that have it, although they "fixed" this a few weeks back by simply turning off the radar on the older cars. The parking sensors on the Tesla are really good and very useful. They show a rough outline of what is around you and are displayed very nicely compared to some other cars. It is a real shame to remove this, and downright dishonest to characterize it as some kind of leap forward. The cheapest bargain-bin cars have this feature. Your $100k+ Model S or X will not. Even more concerning: some features simply cannot be replaced by camera. Tesla infamously does not have a front bumper camera, making it impossible to detect obstructions occluded from view by the hood. For 3/S, which are low, this means it will be impossible to detect low obstructions like too-high concrete wheel stops and similar obstructions. Once the hood has occluded the view from the windshield cameras, these obstructions will cease to exist. Laughable that this is being done on cars from a high-end brand, and that the remedy for customers who are getting worse cars today than you would get yesterday is to wait for these features to "be restored" at some indeterminate time in the future.

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drcross 4y ago
When you have a several month wait list for your product, legions of devoted potential customers, if you're head and shoulders above any of your competitors, you're able to get away with things like this.
- hansonkd13 4y ago
  > if you're head and shoulders above any of your competitors, you're able to get away with things like this. The hubris of Tesla is still believing this to be the case. I personally cancelled my cybertruck order from lack of interest. better competition exists in 2022 that wasn’t the case years ago.

modeless 4y ago

This would potentially work... if the cameras could see the places where the ultrasonic sensors were. But they can't! There are big blind spots near the bumpers. I guess they are planning to just have the car fill in the blind spots by remembering what it saw from other perspectives? But that only works when the car is moving and can't account for small obstacles that can move unpredictably, like animals or toddlers. I'm sympathetic to the idea that it's possible to drive a car with just cameras, but the specific cameras that Tesla has aren't good enough. They need more coverage, better quality, and self-cleaning.

valine 4y ago
I assume these new Teslas will have a bumper camera. No way they’re planning to rely on memory.
- yreg 4y ago
  In that case they would need to maintain software for both loadouts or install additional camera to the cars they shipped up until now.
- modeless 4y ago
  They don't: https://old.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/y3ymsr/2023_model_3_without_uss/ https://old.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/y3ymsr/2023_mo...

davewritescode 4y ago

This is typical Tesla. Tell you they're giving you a great new feature when in reality they've made the product worse.

atonse 4y ago

I have had a model 3 for four years and the autopilot has steadily gotten worse. In summer 2019 we went on a road trip that was 10 hours of total driving (each way), where I actually drove for maybe 30 mins total. It was flawless and downright magical. Since then we often have the car slam brakes out of the blue (once waking up my sleeping family and causing both kids to cry), and a few other times. I have lost trust with the autopilot system. It’s that simple. And I LOVE my model 3, the supercharger network, all else. I don’t know what’s going on over there but I am not remotely convinced that they have their act together with vision-only based autonomous driving.

WXLCKNO 4y ago
I drove a new M3 in Germany last week and was blown away by how well the assisted driving features worked. Below 60 kmh it also allows you to never touch the steering wheel while on the highway in a traffic jam. For my purposes it seemed superior to the current Tesla system and after watching some comparison videos, my conclusion seemed accurate.
- dagmx 4y ago
  In your sentence are you referring to a BMW M3? Since Tesla also have an M3 (edit: albeit abbreviated) I was a tad confused by your second paragraph
  - aaomidi 4y ago
    Tesla is technically Model 3, not M3
    - dagmx 4y ago
      It is but a lot of folks shorten it to M3 as well.
      - KerrAvon 4y ago
        A knowledgeable car person will never, ever call the Model 3 an M3.

rootusrootus 4y ago

This does not make me optimistic for Tesla's future. Unless this is truly a temporary thing due to a supply shortage and they are planning to return to normal when they can. Tesla's track record is poor. They cheaped out on a few dollars for an IR rain sensor like everyone else uses, and as a result the wipers on a Model 3 are psychotic. Combine that with their hatred for manual controls, and I had a terrible experience every winter when the rains really started. Now they don't have radar, which everyone else does. AFAIK they still haven't got that reliable IR sensor. No CarPlay yet, which 99% of all other cars have. No 360 degree camera view. No ultrasonic parking sensors. Why again would I buy another Tesla? The competition has more features. The cherry on top is Tesla's demonstrated willingness to screw over their customers well after the sale, and not even for the benefit of the company. Just because they hate their customers, I guess. That alone is a deal killer for me now.

LightG 4y ago
These all look like push factors and are serious enough on their own. But I don't even need them. I'm pulled by Hyundai. Their recent design language has me and I'd argue they have the better all around packages. Personally, Telsa aren't even the top dog anymore. It'll take time for others to see it.
- dahfizz 4y ago
  I agree that Hyundai is killing it, and I will seriously consider the ioniq 6 when it is available. However, I don't think you can discount Tesla here. They produce ~ 5x more model 3's than Hyundai can produce ioniq 5's. And the Tesla battery / motor specs are much better. I don't see any real competition for Tesla at their price point, specs, and production capabilities. Which is frustrating, because I want an EV but I will not buy a Tesla.
  - KerrAvon 4y ago
    Which price point? Lots of non-Tesla EVs selling for a wide range of price points right now. Totally with you on the Ioniq 6 — very attractive, and will have better service options should something go wrong. Would also consider Polestar 2. Maybe the Ford Mustang Mach-E. Maybe.

diebeforei485 4y ago

I'm not entirely sure this is a good idea. But their removal of radar seems to have gone okay, so perhaps they've done their calibration tests and know this can be done.

CivBase 4y ago

> Will vehicles equipped with ultrasonic sensors have their functionality removed? > At this time, we do not plan to remove the functionality of ultrasonic sensors in our existing fleet. I really really do not like the use of the phrase "our existing fleet" here. It heavily implies that Tesla has some level of ownership over the vehicles they sell post-purchase.

salil999 4y ago
They do though! They can easily disable features like Autopilot, Autopark, Summon, etc fleetwide in a snap if they wanted to.
- simondotau 4y ago
  Legally, I'm pretty sure they couldn't. Technically, this is true for any product which has a pathway for software updates. Arguably this includes nearly all models of car on sale today, which can have their software updated — even if the process is more cumbersome. The key difference is that a Tesla vehicle can conveniently perform comprehensive whole-of-car updates while it's sitting in your garage, whereas many other cars can only have some systems updated during a service visit. Regardless, I don't see how software updates being convenient could serve as the defining criteria for a manufacturer having "ownership over the vehicles they sell".
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    > Legally, I'm pretty sure they couldn't. Somewhat related question: do Teslas have a EULA or other agreement on purchase? And if so, does it include an arbitration clause?
    - simondotau 4y ago
      I’m saying they couldn’t do it because it’s a safety related feature of a heavily safety-regulated product category. I don’t think any EULA could override that.

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Ninjinka 4y ago

Geohot was right. Tweet re: LIDAR, but still: "When this delusion ends and all these companies fold, it won't be LIDAR vs. Or ride sharing vs. None of this matters. All that matters is building an intelligent machine. Self driving is 100% a software problem. Given software written by God, a smartphone can drive a car." https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/1577045884159676416?s=20&t=5aVypqn7XE8lC6L4nyVuBg https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/1577045884159676416?s=20...

015a 4y ago
Musk has said similar things in the past; that cars should be able to do everything human drivers can do with only vision, because that's all human drivers have (discounting the far more minor sensory inputs like sound and touch). I find that take fascinating. Its, in effect, saying "well, computer hardware and the human brain are similar enough; the human brain just got an evolutionary headstart on its software, so once we solve that we're golden". Not only is there no evidence to support this conclusion; its trivial to recognize that the human brain and computers operate differently, at a fundamental, logical level. The brain has no transistors. It doesn't care about XOR or solid state memory. There is literally no part of the human brain which even remotely resembles any internal part of a computer; not remotely. Why is it so accepted that this problem can be solved in software? Or, maybe: it can be solved, but it will take so much computing power that any computer which could solve it in real time couldn't fit in or be powered by a car? Virtualizing linux on my Windows PC incurs a double-digit percentage performance penalty, and that's on the same ISA; what is the human brain's ISA? AI is an emulation of human behavior; what is it's performance penalty? Are we just surfing Moore's Law hoping to outrun it? I just find the hubris of his statement baffling; that we, meaning Our Scientific Community, literally does not completely understand why or how acetaminophen works to alleviate pain in the human brain; yet they and Musk are wholly confident that given the same inputs their software can emulate the human brain's outputs. I'll commit this to the public record, and feel free to revisit in ten years; if a synthetic brain system ever hits performance parity with the human brain in a task like driving or consciousness, it will be running on hardware that looks nothing like what I'm typing on. I suspect that even calling it "hardware", with emphasis on the word "hard", will seem antiquated. Maybe self driving is 100% a software problem; but the brain doesn't really differentiate.

bearjaws 4y ago

This will absolutely not work, I have FSD and it messes up distance of large well defined objects, think about how this will work with a concrete wall, or curbs that it can probably no longer see. When I pull into my garage sometimes it recognizes my shelf as a car ON FSD....

valine 4y ago
The output of the “occupancy network” isn’t displayed to the user right now. It doesn’t do classification, it’s just raw voxels. The real bummer is that without ultra sonics the car can’t see the ground in front of it. Hopefully tesla adds a bumper camera.
- flutas 4y ago
  > The output of the “occupancy network” isn’t displayed to the user right now. I may be mis-understanding, or experiencing something else but I think it is if you're on FSD. It shows up as grey (elevated) regions around the visuals, not the standard "not a road" grey. The gates for my community began showing up in this update with it, but they look like about 2-3ft tall triangles, not a gate... though still recognized I guess?
  - simondotau 4y ago
    As stated by Tesla just a few days ago, the occupancy network is not currently shown in the customer-facing visualisation. (Some unrecognised objects are represented by generic placeholders. This is derived from, but not the output of, the occupancy network.) This video links to the relevant citation, and if you continue watching for around ten seconds you can see examples of the occupancy network visualised: https://youtu.be/ODSJsviD_SU?t=4337 https://youtu.be/ODSJsviD_SU?t=4337
    - flutas 4y ago
      I don't think it will ever be shown as "raw data" like that though. They will most likely only show the current street view, with cars and unknown objects that are in the road.

vzaliva 4y ago

As an engineer, I see little value in removing any sensors. No matter how noisy or limited they are, they bring additional information which, if processed, could improve overall accuracy. This is commonly referred to as "sensor fusion". So this is probably is purely cost-saving move. While I understand how radar could be expensive, I am not sure the saving on much cheaper ultrasound sensors is worth the loss of additional information about the environment. As Telsa Model 3 owner, I can attest that their automatic parking rarely works anyway. They should be adding more sensors to improve it, not remove them.

victor22 4y ago
this seems like a major downgrade disguised as questionable upgrade
kypro 4y ago
I've worked on 3d vision systems before and have experimented using different types of sensors in multi-sensor setups, and I'd argue that overwhelmingly it's a software problem. More sensors help, but passed a point it's extremely marginal, plus you're throwing the majority of the raw data away anyway. I do agree though - assuming processing power isn't a performance bottleneck here, more data is always better. But there's a reason humans only have two eyes and not three or four, for example. Two eyes are really all you need.
- macrolime 4y ago
  Completely off topic, but there's a fascinating list of animals with more than two eyes. For example the four eyed fish which uses one pair of eyes to see below water and one pair to see above water, when it's swimming along the surface. https://wildlifeinformer.com/animals-with-more-than-2-eyes/ https://wildlifeinformer.com/animals-with-more-than-2-eyes/
- creshal 4y ago
  > More sensors help, but passed a point it's extremely marginal, plus you're throwing the majority of the raw data away anyway. Unless other sensors break, then they're suddenly useful redundancy. In a safety critical product like this, that alone should preclude the removal of sensors. > But there's a reason humans only have two eyes and not three or four, for example. Two eyes are really all you need. You still get two, both for depth sensing and for redundancy; and some animals like spiders have 6-8 eyes.

pavlov 4y ago

As a Tesla customer I’m so used to being constantly gaslighted that it’s a pleasant surprise when they’re only removing features from new cars rather than my existing one.

yreg 4y ago
Just wait until they stop supporting our legacy ultrasonics in software.

ultrahax 4y ago

When parking in tight spaces, getting exact-distance feedback from the ultrasonic sensors is pretty handy. I can't see how vision will replace that; I don't think any of the cameras can see that close to the bumper.

01100011 4y ago

Does anyone else think they're running out of compute power on their DL computer and trying to eliminate sensor fusion in order to preserve precious cycles for vision processing? I've long wondered if TSLA screwed up by choosing the hardware before fully solving the problem, leaving millions of vehicles incapable of performing safe FSD without HW upgrades.

macrolime 4y ago
It does seem rather underpowered if you compare it with the requirements of state of the art Deep Learning models in other areas, not an apples and oranges comparison though.

socialismisok 4y ago

This reads strongly like, "we're losing, badly, and we hope this will buy enough runway for us to figure things out before we've lost completely." I genuinely don't know why anyone would buy into Tesla now.

potatochup 4y ago
How does this indicate that they are losing? In what regard? They certainly aren't losing on being a money making enterprise, before or after this change. Or did you mean w.r.t. having autonomous cars? I don't see how adding more work will buy runway...
- socialismisok 4y ago
  When leadership sees numbers going in the wrong direction, they squeeze everywhere they can. Often this means making poor long term or poor engineering decisions in hopes they can squeeze some short term gain. What I see, from decades of being an engineer, is a company making a bad decision probably to cut costs. Why would Tesla need to cut costs? Something isn't working out correctly.
  - simondotau 4y ago
    There's no evidence that Tesla has a unit cost problem. If anything the opposite is true. Tesla has significantly higher automotive margins than all mainstream competitors, despite producing 100% EVs with large expensive lithium battery packs. While their competitors mostly produce mature, highly cost optimised ICE vehicles. The result is that Tesla has insane amounts of cash on hand and record-breaking profits, despite rapidly constructing/expanding three factories on three continents.
    - socialismisok 4y ago
      It's not the unit cost that's the problem. The unit cost decrease is a patch that can buy time to address eg an engineering cost problem, or a "we're going to need to buy bigger chips soon to get this to work" problem.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

Strong corpspeak here, where they sell you the removal of a feature like a benefit. It's even topping Apple selling copy/paste as revolutionary.

yalogin 4y ago

This also means these sensors will be disabled at some point in older cars too. Interesting move though I am not qualified to comment on the technical merits of it

theshrike79 4y ago

I read this Somewhere(tm), if anyone can confirm it I'd be grateful: The issue with Tesla's camera only neural network thing is that it needs a TON of cycles to determine the distance of every point in the image. With LIDAR, for example, you get the direction and distance in the same datapoint without any extra calculation. And the current generation of Tesla cars are operating pretty much at the limit of their power and will run out of resources unless Tesla manages to do some crazy optimisations on their detection algorithms/neural network training.

mostertoaster 4y ago

So visual cues are replacing ultra sonic ones? I just see bats flying in these huge swarms not colliding and I’m like maybe we shouldn’t give up on ultrasonic sensors.

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philjohn 4y ago

The alternate headline should really be "Tesla FSD, but only when it's not foggy, or raining heavily".

vegardx 4y ago

Given that my Model 3 seems to think (visualized on the screen) that my garage door is a semi-trailer pointing towards me, I'm inclined to not believe that they can't do all of this with cameras only.

tibbydudeza 4y ago

Does a Tesla have a rear parking camera ???.

yreg 4y ago
Yes, these are the camera angles. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DFh2Vv4XUAIVStb.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DFh2Vv4XUAIVStb.jpg The main issue is that none of them sees right ahead the front bumper and they of course don't work when obstructed.

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spaetzleesser 4y ago

I am not sure if this is smart technically but from an environmental perspective I prefer cars to have passive sensors. Blasting out ultrasound and Lidar is pollution that can impact animals. Personally I think self driving cars will only work once roads are built for them with specific markers and self driving cars communicate with each other.