AMIRZA786

Elon Musk Overruled Tesla Engineers Who Said Removing Radar Would Be Problematic: Report

Two years later, Tesla is installing a new version of the sensor in its vehicles

A significant number of Tesla engineers were overruled by the company’s CEO Elon Musk when they tried to warn him that removing the radar sensor from the American carmaker’s models would be problematic, a new report published in The Washington Post shows.

Back in May 2021, Tesla announced that it was eliminating radar on its new cars in a push to switch to the so-called Tesla Vision approach, which only uses cameras to “see” the road and neural networks that are supposed to mimic the way a human brain works.

Before the announcement, however, several Tesla engineers were worried that this move had a high risk of causing problems, including increasing the risk of accidents if the cameras were obscured by raindrops or even bright sunlight.






“Some Tesla engineers were aghast, said former employees with knowledge of his reaction, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. They contacted a trusted former executive for advice on how to talk Musk out of it, in previously unreported pushback,” the Washington Post story says.

“Musk was unconvinced and overruled his engineers. In May 2021 Tesla announced it was eliminating radar on new cars. Soon after, the company began disabling radar in cars already on the road. The result, according to interviews with nearly a dozen former employees and test drivers, safety officials and other experts, was an uptick in crashes, near misses and other embarrassing mistakes by Tesla vehicles suddenly deprived of a critical sensor,” the report adds.

According to the story, Musk’s erratic leadership played a role in the unpolished releases of its Autopilot and so-called Full Self-Driving features, with engineers forced to work at a breakneck pace to develop software and push it to the public before it was ready. More worryingly, some former Tesla employees say that even today, the software isn’t safe for public road use, with a former test operator going on record saying that internally, the company is “nowhere close” to having a finished product. The person in question was fired by Tesla in February 2022.



The American EV company led by Elon Musk eliminated the front-facing radar from its vehicles in 2021 and soon after began disabling the units that were already fitted on delivered vehicles. A year later, Tesla removed the ultrasonic sensor from its models.

This year, however, new cars that are equipped with the firm’s latest Hardware 4 computer also feature a new, high-resolution radar and more cameras, according to previous reports.

As Electrek writes, Elon Musk said around the time of the removal of the radar in 2021 that he was most frustrated with the quality of the radar itself and believed that a high-resolution unit would improve the company’s driver assistance systems.

In related news, Tesla started pushing the latest update to its Full Self-Driving software a few days ago, which merges the previous two separate stacks to a single software stack.

https://insideevs.com/news/658439/el...radar-removal/

bitkahuna

iTrader: (20)

gee, i said when it happened that removing radar was stupid, but fans said it musk be the greatest idea ever.

glad they're adding radar back.

AMIRZA786

I'm no engineer, so it wasn't me that made any comments, pro or con . It also shows that Musk, although a genius, is not perfect...or always right. But to be fair, plenty of other automakers have made some very head scratching decisions that have put the possible future of their companies at risk

AMIRZA786

Tesla To Receive A Second 9,000-Ton Giga Press In Texas For Cybertruck Production

The huge packages started arriving in the United States a few days ago

Tesla is set to receive several shipments from Idra Group Italy containing a second 9,000-ton Giga Press that’s headed to the company’s Texas Gigafactory, according to a bill of lading posted by the user greggertruck on the Cybetruck Owners Club forum a couple of days ago.

The shipment documents reveal that two containers with a total weight of 58,863 pounds (26,700 kilograms) were sent from Italy to the port of Houston, with the goods being labeled as “die-casting machines, die-casting machine parts” and the recipient being Tesla, Inc.

Other bills of lading show several crates containing things like “machine base,” “tie bars,” and “fixed platen,” leading us to believe that these are in fact parts of a soon-to-be-installed second Giga Press in Texas.

Additionally, two short videos (embedded below) posted about a month ago on Idra’s official Linkedin page show what appears to be the Giga Press in question, with one description reading “GigaPress needs giga assembly. Everyone working hard to deliver on time with a successful project.”



Idra Group previously delivered another Giga Press in Asia. The first Texas-bound Giga Press, which will be partly responsible for creating the body panels of the upcoming Cybertruck pickup, was spotted at the factory in the middle of January when workers were seen assembling the world’s largest aluminum die-casting machine.

Back then, a flyover video from a drone operator led us to believe that the Texas Gigafactory has enough room for up to three Giga Presses. Now we’re seeing that Tesla is on its way to equipping the facility with a second massive die-casting machine and getting ready for the production start of the highly anticipated Cybertruck.

As a reminder, Tesla’s electric pickup truck will enter limited production this summer, with an expected ramp-up in production in 2024, according to Elon Musk. As for the truck’s specs, it’s been confirmed that it will feature the latest Hardware 4 computer, and several videos posted online suggest that the Cybertruck will have an adaptive air suspension system.

https://insideevs.com/news/658504/te...a-press-texas/

LeX2K

Removing RADAR was the best thing Tesla ever did. It forced the engineering teams to fully embrace vision only FSD no RADAR crutch. Since RADAR was removed FSD has improved dramatically to say the least go watch some old FSD vids on cars that had RADAR, scary bad. Vision only has all but eliminated phantom braking.

Now Tesla has a system will a fully realized 3D construct using only cameras, adding high rez RADAR back in will serve as a nice augmentation.

Critical sensor that turned out not to be critical. I assume those engineers have a new career at Starbucks.

AMIRZA786

I would feel safer with both, to be honest. My Polestars safety systems mostly rely on camera (It does have parking sensors), and when they get fogged up or wet from rain, I sometimes get warnings that my collision systems cameras are "blocked" and need to be cleaned

Allen K

iTrader: (4)

The left pillar camera on my 3 still goes blind when I use my turn signal at night. I'll take the radar.

bitkahuna

iTrader: (20)

knew that was coming, haha.

let's remove the brake pedal next so the car does better at braking by itself too.

cameras may be great in daylight clear weather (maybe they have IR too for night), but radar can see through rain, snow, fog, unlike cameras. a system without radar is lunacy.

since those heathen engineers dared to disagree with the holy musk, perhaps they should be burned at the stake.

LeX2K

Your car has a design error the turn signal/camera module has a hole in the PCB that allows light to leak into the camera lens. Very stupid flaw you can fix it with a piece of black tape. This has since been fixed.

TangoRed

Lol yeah that was too much fanboyism for me. Removing radar shouldn't be seen as a positive forcing function here in my opinion.

AMIRZA786

I'm in the "give me radar" camp. I'll even pay the extra $400 or so to include it. I'm also a "fanman" (I'm no boy ), but it just doesn't make logical sense to just rely on cameras, no matter how good they are. And they are good, as I've seen in my brother in laws Model 3

LeX2K

I'm curious why people think RADAR solves the problem of how the car knows to drive itself on any street in any given scenario. I've watched many FSD beta vids 99% of the mistakes have zero to do with seeing the road.

There are cases where vision can't see the road correctly, but that is not a neural network software problem, which is 1000000x harder to solve than simply imaging the surroundings. And that is not even getting into RADAR having serious issues differentiating between stationary and moving objects. Hello phantom braking.

But I get it, RADAR is seen as some sort of fix all. I simply don't know why.

AMIRZA786

I've pretty much stayed quiet when Tesla decided to remove radar, but I'm hearing from people much smarter than myself that it was a purely cost cutting measure. Does FSD work the same on a foggy, rainy day as a clear day? Does it work just as well at night, in the rain etc? I don't know the answer to that. But why not continue to use high resolution cameras and radar?

Tesla is adding radar back, so there must some reasoning for that, as Elon doesn't really care what other think

LeX2K

This misses the point. FSD is a 99.99999% a software problem, RADAR was giving phantom imagery so they got rid of it. To answer your question FSD does work in rain, snow, at night but there are limitations at times vision won't be good enough and it shuts off. A single RADAR unit won't fix this in fact I don't know of anything that will. Technology doesn't exist to give a 360 degree perfect imaging construct of the surroundings regardless of weather, at least not something you can stuff in a car. Pure infrared is a possibility but the tech is not there yet.

There are some conditions you can't drive in including humans. Even aircraft gets grounded and guess what kind of tech they use.
Tesla designed their own RADAR unit and is adding that back. Not the same thing they removed.

AMIRZA786

OK, give me that! BTW, the phantom imagery can most likely be fixed with software, it just may take longer. If you rely on images and radar, you would be able to cancel out that phantom imagery, as the object wouldn't be seen on the camera. Anyway, I don't know enough about this to make any further comments