Tesla decided they wanted 'birds eye view', which most of their competitors had. To get that, they needed more cameras and more camera inputs on their autopilot computer. It would be a big redesign of many features of the car. With birds eye view, parking sensors aren't really needed anymore, so they didn't place an order for new sensors.
However... The big new birds eye view feature gets delayed by ~ a year, because it depends on new autopilot silicon (HW4).
Tesla is now stuck - they don't have the sensors to make the old version, the sensors themselves are EOL by the manufacturer, and the new version isn't ready yet.
So - the CEO takes the fall, and announces that this was the plan all along. Software would replace the sensors.
That kept people happy for months. But the software team was pulling their hair out - the camera placement on the old HW3 cars was insufficient to see things very near the vehicle needed for parking, so it was never going to work well.
And the autopilot software team is being pulled in a lot of directions, and hasn't really met expectations on any targets lately - although perhaps they're trying to achieve the unachievable.
Given the original screwup (not having a backup plan for when this big new feature was delayed by a year), I think they made the best of a bad situation. Their approach of 'promise the impossible, and then underdeliver' will hurt the brand, but probably less so than any other approach.
> With birds eye view, parking sensors aren't really needed anymore, so they didn't place an order for new sensors.
Sorry but that's a large logical chasm you just casually leapt. How does bird's eye view magically determine the distance to a textureless wall when parallax fails to detect it?
Why do cars with birds eye view still come equipped with parking sensors if they are obviated?
This is a fault in design philosophy. Remember MCAS, where Boeing decided their solution to a hardware design problem was a software workaround? I know it's tempting, but these types of design decisions need a very careful thought process to work; they shouldn't be a last-ditch workaround. I guess I give TSLA some slack here because it's only applied to parking, but I hope they don't apply the same design philosophy on more safety critical systems.
> Their approach of 'promise the impossible, and then underdeliver' will hurt the brand, but probably less so than any other approach.
I have worked for several other automakers and they plan platform changes 3-7 years out. I know that's not Tesla's style, but that long term planning usually prevents these cases of under delivering what you promised. That's because the marketing department isn't promising anything until engineering has it working on a mule and manufacturing operations has the parts on order for production.
The idea that bog standard 'birds eye view' would require HW4 is the saddest thing I've heard today. How powerful is the computer that Nissan puts in a rogue to provide that view, as compared with HW4?
"Given the original screwup (not having a backup plan for when this big new feature was delayed by a year), I think they made the best of a bad situation."
Yes, by greed and arrogance they shot themselves in the foot. But the day after that happened, they had no more opportunities for greed so they dealt with things as well as they could and you can't criticize them for that, now can you?
The scenario of "we'll go from the old thing to the new thing, burn our bridges to the old thing and not have the thing ready" these days in a multitude of industries and isn't something that should be taken as OK by those who caught by it.
This is not accurate. Most cars that have 360/top down views still have parking sensors. Tesla has just been steadily removing features to increase profit margins.
Can the cars sold without the sensors plausibly be retrofitted later by Tesla service? That would be a good gesture and solution but depends on how completely they removed it I suppose.
In a nutshell, this whole process is the reason two Tesla owners are without heads. I realize that has nothing to do with the parking sensors, but the real problem is the engineering process.
Tesla is single handedly responsible for setting the robotics industry back decades (pre 2007) with their capricious and glib attitude toward autonomous safety. Back then, its was completely unheard of for people to be testing 2-ton autonomous hardware in public on consumers. Enter Tesla and Elon Musk, and suddenly they are responsible for a general attitude that it's okay to just put these things into your community without any warnings, or laws, or safety protocols, or apparently even sensors.
Regardless of their desire, it is very easy for the cameras on a Tesla in the rain to have water in front of the lens. This makes it very hard to see anything from the camera.
I dread how software trained on cameras working under normal conditions will interpret the resulting mess of an image.
This still doesn't add up. The new HW4 Model 3 "highland" doesn't have more cameras. Notably there is a no front bumper camera. It also have one LESS camera in the windshield. The HW4 board DOES have space for more cameras though.
I have both birds eye and ultrasound sensors all round and I’d give up the Birds Eye first easily. And there is no way Tesla will completely replace the ultrasound distance sensing with software. Ultrasound sensors are cheap compared to making multiple cameras equally reliable for depth sensing which I imagine must require deicing and wash nozzles to work well. I need to rub my finger over the lenses of my side and rear cameras every day with rain or snow (So daily for at least half the year).
> the CEO takes the fall, and announces that this was the plan all along. Software would replace the sensors.
the CEO doesn't "take the fall", he __has__ the fall. He's the one deciding to gamble people safety and to hand to his engineers yet another unnecessary hot potato for sake of profit and share holders dividends.
I have a 2023 Model Y without radar sensors and got the parking assist update recently. It's by far one of the most annoying updates I got. Sitting in traffic, it would trigger itself thinking that I'm trying to park. Parking in the garage is now even more annoying with the cameras not being able to accurately figure out how much distance they have instead of reality. I miss the radar sensors. They need to bring them back. My wife's seven year old Infiniti is doing a better job at helping me back into a parking spot than the Tesla does. Insanity.
I'm pretty close to just disabling the chime altogether. It's terribly inaccurate, and tries to warn me of all the things I'm about to hit even though I'm clearly not. Just watching the wavy lines all around the car as they shift and move when the car is stationary... well, it doesn't inspire much confidence in the technology.
Parking in my own garage, the FSD preview graphics hallucinates all sorts of other vehicles, semi trucks, humans, you name it.
I also have a 2023 Model Y. I was so surprised when I bought it that it had no parking sensors. I was desperate for the update. I just received the update and now I would be happier without it. It's just constant beeping to the point where I can't concentrate on actually parking. Most days it's parallel parking on small European streets so trying to do this without sensors is very difficult. I think I might just go back to "parking by touch".
Tesla seems to be quickly burning its reputation with consumers. Elon seems very good at doing things, but not great at maintaining it. Recently when Karpathy left Tesla and is now at OpenAI, IMO that is good sign that this is no Steve Jobs 2.0, capable of maintaining one the best teams in the world at Apple.
Hell at this point, if you look at mature company CEO vs startup, Tim Cook seems better than Elon. Honestly Elon's companies are all suffering from what appears to be his own mismanagement.
I appreciate Telsa's ambition to push technology forward but they shouldn't experiment with customers in real time like this. You want to replace parking sensors with vision, go right ahead, prove it in the lab first, don't remove the parking sensors and just assume that the engineers will figure it out.
I have a 2018 Tesla Model 3. It has been the absolute best car I've ever owned. But it will be my last and only Tesla.
A Model 3 built today has less features, costs more, and performs worse than my 2018 Model 3.
The Autopilot/FSD nonsense has soured me off the Tesla brand.
I will admit though, that the competition, even today is lacking compared to my 2018 Model 3, but I'm hoping Rivian pulls through and WV has got some nice stuff coming as well. I'm in no hurry though, I think my current EV can easily last another 5-10 years, so I'm optimistic.
Man, what a coincidence. My neighbor across the street just bought a Tesla this weekend. Having just returned from driving Hyundai IONIQ 5s, I of course scurried over to check it out. He's thinking about returning it. Why? No parking sensors. Seriously, that's the reason he gave, unprompted from me. He seems otherwise happy with the car, but for this sole feature he might take it back.
IONIQ 5 has parking sensors, BTW. Yes, I pointed this out to my neighbor. :-)
I watched the video, those graphics on the screen seem so glitchy, jumping all over the place every second, like from some bad physics simulation in a video game.
Can't believe it's something that is in production and being sold with a "luxury" car.
It’s really crazy they removed the forward looking radar too, those are so useful and life saving when used for emergency braking. They can even “look”under the car in front of you and get a return for the next car in front of them, to better predict braking needs.
Tesla is behaving like a company which doesn't realize the competition is catching up fast. For a long time they were the only game in town if you wanted an actually-good EV, which let them get away with some of their weirder and worse decisions, but now there are lots of good options available and it's no longer necessary to put up with this. I think they're in for a bad couple years if they don't return to putting the customer first.
This is happening all over Europe and it’s only one of the two insanely popular models Tesla sell. My wife has a Polestar and it’s awesome (second best electric car manufacturer in my mind), but it can’t compete with my model 3.
Try a VW ID and see what you think of the software, in fact try any modern manufacturers software and compare it to Tesla. It’s always junk. The only reason the Polestar is close is because it’s native android running the show.
Tesla have a ton of issues, but the iPhone had a ton of issues when it launched, but if you were shouting about how good your blackberry keyboard was you were having the wrong conversation. I don’t think the other auto companies have embraced the paradigm shift that Tesla have introduced.
I also feel like the fancy software features ate up a lot of resources for not much return, which makes me wonder how much cheaper EVs could get with a more basic/classic set of features (and hardware supporting them). Only need a backup camera, all the sensors can go except for backup, no need for a GPU/PC/AI ASICs on board, etc. Basically a 2014 Ford with an EV drivetrain.
I love my tesla, but the auto wipers are terrible. They have been terrible for 4 years. They made a similar decision to not use a rain sensor, instead using vision.
Ultrasonic sensors are super common in industry. Modules vary by FOV, distance, update rate, mounting, size, etc. We did a semi-formal comparison of the more popular mainland Chinese units last year.
They all have the problem where partial blocks to their FOV (eg. thin post or foliage) or non-perpendicular surfaces generate wildly fluctuating output. Other problem scenarios include dirtied sensor lenses, glass and liquids (feel like reversing through a fish tank?). While these issues are basically inherent to the physics, approaches like sensor arrays, post-processing or visual/inertial sensor fusion, inset mounting and washdown can help to resolve it.
The good thing is at the low end they are dirt cheap, in the order of $0.50 or less at volume, with typical nominal ranges of 45 or 60cm, though 4m may be readily achieved in practice. So for an array of three units with dedicated post-processing you may be talking an anticipated final production cost of around $2 per unit.
That said, your control plane is still going to need to remain seriously skeptical of output, as something as simple as mud can totally destroy your readings.
One may reasonably suspect that Tesla made a strategic decision to move away from ultrasonic owing to the reliability issues pervasive to the technology.
Entirely predictable train wreck in the making. The vision based transition from the start has been a complete mess for years now. Here is a short summary for those that don't understand.
- Mobile Eye dumps Tesla in AP1 days forcing them to develop their own vision based auto pilot aka AP2
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/09/tesla-dropped-by-mobile...
For those that aren't aware it took years for it to work nearly as well as AP1.
- Tesla removes rain senor in favor of vision based detection in AP2 cars as well. To this day vision based rain sensing is one of the worst features of the car. It is laughably bad in certain scenarios (night).
- Early 2021 Tesla removes radar in favor of vision based cruise control and Traffic aware cruise control. Again, the product was rushed out due to supply shortages in an unfinished state. Still to this day the speed limit and distance settings are not on parity with radar enable cars. Vision based cars still deal with frequent phantom braking (just google it). Surprise surprise this one was so bad radar is coming back in hardware 4.
I've AP1,2, and 3 cars now and we were forced to sell our 2021 Y over issue #3 the phantom braking in the vision based system. I've heard it has gotten better but this parking sensor business is just more of the same from Tesla. Another one that is flying under the radar with HW4, Tesla is removing the ambient outdoor temperature sensor. This is right up there with the rain sensor. I can't tell you how many times I've been traveling through a weather system or going up and down elevation it's nice to know the actual temperature, not something fed from an API.
This is solidly mad. In a car, you have the opportunity for the perfect collaboration of hardware and software - computer vision is great if all you have is a rubbish PC webcam as the lowest common denominator, but when you control the hardware, why on earth would you give up sensors that give you actual depth calculations!?!
Worsening products to improve stakeholder value. But they forgot that the value itself is generated by good products that people actually want to use. Very shortsighted.
Automated parking is a feature available on many cars in the USA now, but I haven't myself driven one yet. Does this feature in other brands typically use ultrasonic sensors, or just computer vision? how is it implemented for other brands?
My wife's 2022 Chevy Suburban excluded both radar-distancing cruise control and also parking sensors.
It is very annoying, but Tesla is not the only one that has had to make these compromises. At least Tesla is trying to solve the same problem, Chevy dealership says they will "eventually" be able to retrofit (ha...). They do still have rearview cameras and a front windshield.
OMG! that was pretty bad. In our Toyota Rav4 it shows camera stitched 360 view. I as a user get to decide with my eyes and brain what is around and my visual cortex does a decent job even in rainy/blurry scenario.
It seems Tesla is hiding the raw camera output and letting their vision stack perceive (which is pretty bad compared to human visual cortex).
[+] [-] londons_explore|2 years ago|reply
Tesla decided they wanted 'birds eye view', which most of their competitors had. To get that, they needed more cameras and more camera inputs on their autopilot computer. It would be a big redesign of many features of the car. With birds eye view, parking sensors aren't really needed anymore, so they didn't place an order for new sensors.
However... The big new birds eye view feature gets delayed by ~ a year, because it depends on new autopilot silicon (HW4).
Tesla is now stuck - they don't have the sensors to make the old version, the sensors themselves are EOL by the manufacturer, and the new version isn't ready yet.
So - the CEO takes the fall, and announces that this was the plan all along. Software would replace the sensors.
That kept people happy for months. But the software team was pulling their hair out - the camera placement on the old HW3 cars was insufficient to see things very near the vehicle needed for parking, so it was never going to work well.
And the autopilot software team is being pulled in a lot of directions, and hasn't really met expectations on any targets lately - although perhaps they're trying to achieve the unachievable.
Given the original screwup (not having a backup plan for when this big new feature was delayed by a year), I think they made the best of a bad situation. Their approach of 'promise the impossible, and then underdeliver' will hurt the brand, but probably less so than any other approach.
[+] [-] mertd|2 years ago|reply
Sorry but that's a large logical chasm you just casually leapt. How does bird's eye view magically determine the distance to a textureless wall when parallax fails to detect it?
Why do cars with birds eye view still come equipped with parking sensors if they are obviated?
[+] [-] bumby|2 years ago|reply
This is a fault in design philosophy. Remember MCAS, where Boeing decided their solution to a hardware design problem was a software workaround? I know it's tempting, but these types of design decisions need a very careful thought process to work; they shouldn't be a last-ditch workaround. I guess I give TSLA some slack here because it's only applied to parking, but I hope they don't apply the same design philosophy on more safety critical systems.
[+] [-] bonestamp2|2 years ago|reply
I have worked for several other automakers and they plan platform changes 3-7 years out. I know that's not Tesla's style, but that long term planning usually prevents these cases of under delivering what you promised. That's because the marketing department isn't promising anything until engineering has it working on a mule and manufacturing operations has the parts on order for production.
[+] [-] croes|2 years ago|reply
That's the opposite of taking the fall. That's shifting the blame to the software department.
[+] [-] rootusrootus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outworlder|2 years ago|reply
Why? Cars with orders of magnitude less processing power have that. Is that because of the lack of camera inputs?
[+] [-] joe_the_user|2 years ago|reply
Yes, by greed and arrogance they shot themselves in the foot. But the day after that happened, they had no more opportunities for greed so they dealt with things as well as they could and you can't criticize them for that, now can you?
The scenario of "we'll go from the old thing to the new thing, burn our bridges to the old thing and not have the thing ready" these days in a multitude of industries and isn't something that should be taken as OK by those who caught by it.
[+] [-] greenthrow|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sschueller|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cstejerean|2 years ago|reply
I can see someone at Tesla making this determination if they never actually drove a competitor vehicle that has birds eye view and parking sensors.
[+] [-] paxys|2 years ago|reply
I believe it was more that they couldn't get the sensors due to supply chain issues.
[+] [-] Clamchop|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ModernMech|2 years ago|reply
Tesla is single handedly responsible for setting the robotics industry back decades (pre 2007) with their capricious and glib attitude toward autonomous safety. Back then, its was completely unheard of for people to be testing 2-ton autonomous hardware in public on consumers. Enter Tesla and Elon Musk, and suddenly they are responsible for a general attitude that it's okay to just put these things into your community without any warnings, or laws, or safety protocols, or apparently even sensors.
[+] [-] btilly|2 years ago|reply
I dread how software trained on cameras working under normal conditions will interpret the resulting mess of an image.
[+] [-] modeless|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benmorris|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alkonaut|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unlucio|2 years ago|reply
the CEO doesn't "take the fall", he __has__ the fall. He's the one deciding to gamble people safety and to hand to his engineers yet another unnecessary hot potato for sake of profit and share holders dividends.
[+] [-] dawnerd|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jasonmp85|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkotov|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rootusrootus|2 years ago|reply
Parking in my own garage, the FSD preview graphics hallucinates all sorts of other vehicles, semi trucks, humans, you name it.
[+] [-] mousetree|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kranke155|2 years ago|reply
Hell at this point, if you look at mature company CEO vs startup, Tim Cook seems better than Elon. Honestly Elon's companies are all suffering from what appears to be his own mismanagement.
[+] [-] judge2020|2 years ago|reply
They're USS, radar was just for measuring the distance from the car in front of you in traffic-aware cruise control.
[+] [-] redox99|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joenathanone|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adoxyz|2 years ago|reply
A Model 3 built today has less features, costs more, and performs worse than my 2018 Model 3.
The Autopilot/FSD nonsense has soured me off the Tesla brand.
I will admit though, that the competition, even today is lacking compared to my 2018 Model 3, but I'm hoping Rivian pulls through and WV has got some nice stuff coming as well. I'm in no hurry though, I think my current EV can easily last another 5-10 years, so I'm optimistic.
[+] [-] mikestew|2 years ago|reply
IONIQ 5 has parking sensors, BTW. Yes, I pointed this out to my neighbor. :-)
[+] [-] temp_account_32|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buildbot|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Analemma_|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benjamoon|2 years ago|reply
https://teslanorth.com/2023/04/01/tesla-model-y-sales-denmar...
This is happening all over Europe and it’s only one of the two insanely popular models Tesla sell. My wife has a Polestar and it’s awesome (second best electric car manufacturer in my mind), but it can’t compete with my model 3.
Try a VW ID and see what you think of the software, in fact try any modern manufacturers software and compare it to Tesla. It’s always junk. The only reason the Polestar is close is because it’s native android running the show.
Tesla have a ton of issues, but the iPhone had a ton of issues when it launched, but if you were shouting about how good your blackberry keyboard was you were having the wrong conversation. I don’t think the other auto companies have embraced the paradigm shift that Tesla have introduced.
[+] [-] foobarian|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viburnum|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stuaxo|2 years ago|reply
Except in this case it's with a car, so injury and death is almost inevitable.
[+] [-] tristanb|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rideontime|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contingencies|2 years ago|reply
They all have the problem where partial blocks to their FOV (eg. thin post or foliage) or non-perpendicular surfaces generate wildly fluctuating output. Other problem scenarios include dirtied sensor lenses, glass and liquids (feel like reversing through a fish tank?). While these issues are basically inherent to the physics, approaches like sensor arrays, post-processing or visual/inertial sensor fusion, inset mounting and washdown can help to resolve it.
The good thing is at the low end they are dirt cheap, in the order of $0.50 or less at volume, with typical nominal ranges of 45 or 60cm, though 4m may be readily achieved in practice. So for an array of three units with dedicated post-processing you may be talking an anticipated final production cost of around $2 per unit.
That said, your control plane is still going to need to remain seriously skeptical of output, as something as simple as mud can totally destroy your readings.
One may reasonably suspect that Tesla made a strategic decision to move away from ultrasonic owing to the reliability issues pervasive to the technology.
[+] [-] benmorris|2 years ago|reply
- Mobile Eye dumps Tesla in AP1 days forcing them to develop their own vision based auto pilot aka AP2 https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/09/tesla-dropped-by-mobile... For those that aren't aware it took years for it to work nearly as well as AP1. - Tesla removes rain senor in favor of vision based detection in AP2 cars as well. To this day vision based rain sensing is one of the worst features of the car. It is laughably bad in certain scenarios (night). - Early 2021 Tesla removes radar in favor of vision based cruise control and Traffic aware cruise control. Again, the product was rushed out due to supply shortages in an unfinished state. Still to this day the speed limit and distance settings are not on parity with radar enable cars. Vision based cars still deal with frequent phantom braking (just google it). Surprise surprise this one was so bad radar is coming back in hardware 4.
I've AP1,2, and 3 cars now and we were forced to sell our 2021 Y over issue #3 the phantom braking in the vision based system. I've heard it has gotten better but this parking sensor business is just more of the same from Tesla. Another one that is flying under the radar with HW4, Tesla is removing the ambient outdoor temperature sensor. This is right up there with the rain sensor. I can't tell you how many times I've been traveling through a weather system or going up and down elevation it's nice to know the actual temperature, not something fed from an API.
[+] [-] brokenmachine|2 years ago|reply
Another 20c saved, lol. That's truly pathetic. I mean, it's not a cheap car.
[+] [-] alexchamberlain|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crorella|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrochkind1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethagknight|2 years ago|reply
It is very annoying, but Tesla is not the only one that has had to make these compromises. At least Tesla is trying to solve the same problem, Chevy dealership says they will "eventually" be able to retrofit (ha...). They do still have rearview cameras and a front windshield.
[+] [-] fatfox|2 years ago|reply
How could this pass testing?
[+] [-] nojvek|2 years ago|reply
It seems Tesla is hiding the raw camera output and letting their vision stack perceive (which is pretty bad compared to human visual cortex).
I wonder why they went that route. Even if they augmented an overlay but still showed camera stitched video like https://babydrive.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/TOYOTA_R..., it'd have still worked.
They don't need to re-invent the wheel here. Overlay is a pure software thing, they are doing a disservice to their users.