Tesla has decided to phase out ultrasonic sensors (USS) used in its electric cars to detect obstacles at short distances, Electrek reports. While other automakers use LiDAR, radar, and other sensors on top of cameras, Elon Musk’s company intends to use only cameras in its Tesla Vision driver assistance system.
The company will remove ultrasonic sensors from the Model 3 and Model Y over the next few months and from the Model S and Model X by 2023. According to Tesla representatives, they are mainly used for parking warnings and short-range collisions.
As a result of the changes, new cars not equipped with USS will have some features limited or disabled, including Park Assist, which warns of surrounding objects when driving at less than 5 MPH, and Autopark, Summon, and Smart Summon. Tesla said it would restore these features with over-the-air updates once they work just as well with a camera-only system. The company believes the changes will not affect the crash safety ratings of these cars.
Tesla last year began phasing out radar sensors in favor of vision-only Autopilot, tweeting that “vision has much more precision [than radar].” At the same time, Musk had previously told employees that if humans could drive cars with binocular vision alone, then cars should be able to do so as well, The New York Times reported last year.
However, Tesla’s radar system could detect potential accidents “two cars ahead” that drivers might not even see, so that seems to have been a lost safety advantage. And when the company canceled the radar, it ran into the problem of “phantom braking,” where the system mistakenly thought the car was about to collide with something.
