Oliver Haslam·

Tesla Confirms It’s Ditching Ultrasonic Sensors And Only Using Tesla Visions Cameras

Tesla has announced that it is going to stop putting ultrasonic sensors in its cars, instead relying solely on cameras for things like Autopilot. The move comes after Tesla confirmed that it would be using Tesla Vision cameras last year.

In order to make Autopilot work, Tesla cars have historically shipped with a combination of cameras and ultrasonic sensors to make everything work.

Electrek notes that there were “eight cameras, a front-facing radar, and several ultrasonic sensors all around its vehicles.”

But that’s now all about to change, with Tesla reportedly of the opinion that the best way to mimic the way people drive cars is to have Autopilot see what they see, and nothing more.

You would think that more data would be better, but Tesla’s idea is that the roads are designed for humans who navigate them using a vision-based system – the natural neural nets in their brains. The automaker believes it best to try to replicate that purely with cameras and artificial neural nets and not let the radar data pollute the system.

Tesla says that it is removing ultrasonic sensors from the Model 3 and Model Y, with the Model S and Model X making the same move starting in 2023.

However, this does mean that some features won’t be available initially — although Tesla says that it will bring them to non-ultrasonic sensing cars eventually. Those include Park Assist, Autopark, Summon, and Smart Summon.

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