[halifaxbeard]

"first gen" Model 3s didn't have an emergency rear door release for when the electrical one failed. they've since added that to more recent generations.

but- a car company that doesn't see the need to have emergency rear door releases has systemic issues. someone, anyone involved in approving that design could have said "no. i will not sign off on this", but they didn't.

it makes me wonder what other corners they cut, and whether those cut corners could kill a driver or passenger- because they're not going to cut corners on anything that would be immediately apparent in daily use: it would be detrimental to sales.

[manmal]

One corner they are cutting is replacing radar with the camera. IMO that’s ridiculous, but it’s certainly made a few million extra.

[simondotau]

Removing the ultrasonic parking sensors was a downgrade, but removing the radar wasn't. The vision stack was consistently superior to the radar at the time they stopped including them; today it's leagues ahead. Even if you have an older Tesla with a radar sensor, it's been disabled in software because the camera-derived data is so much better.

The scary thing about radar is how terrible the raw data is, and how utterly compromised the filtered data is. Stationary objects have to get substantially filtered out when driving at high speeds, otherwise false positives would be unacceptably common. This affects all brands of car with radar.

This shouldn't be surprising. Subaru managed to jank together Eyesight using a couple of cameras and an in-house team, and they were able to make it outperform radar in most respects. Unfortunately they didn't think to make it self-calibrating, so it requires a trip to the dealership any time you replace the windscreen.