Elon claims that the radar was the primary source of phantom braking. He said that matching up a high fidelity sensor (the cameras) with a lower fidelity sensor (the radar) was proving near impossible. I also suspect the supply chain pains massively factored into his decision to remove the radar from all vehicles since roughly late January of last year.
Anyone in the car industry would know this as obviously false? Radar based emergency breaking is availability and works really well in many cars from 5+ years ago.
Radar was removed in May 2021, which predates the article I quoted by multiple months.
I'm sure Elon was blaming Radar for phantom braking in the April / May time period. We can give a few months for the cars to update to the newest version as well.
But by November 2021, RADAR was no longer a relevant excuse. I think you may be mistaken about when Elon said what and when. You gotta keep the dates in mind.
Respectfully, you’re incorrect on the date of the Tesla vision only hardware release. My wife got a model y in early Feb 2021 and it was in the first batch of Tesla vision vehicles that did not ship with a radar. It was manufacturered in January as that’s when we got the VIN. This is first hand experience, not heresay. Elon announced it after they’d been shipping those vehicles for a bit. I was both amused and surprised. She was pissed off that Autopilot was nerfed compared to my 2018 model 3 for max speed as they were working out bugs in the Tesla Vision branch of the code.
I also never said a date about when Elon said those things in my comment, but now understand what you mean about post-vision. But the FSD Beta and Autopilot codebases are so different I am not sure I’d compare them for phantom braking (though recent FSD Beta appears to have way less of this occurrence).
But maybe I’m biased. We have two Teslas, one with, and one without a radar. We’ve seen much more phantom braking with my radar equipped model 3. Anecdotally, I find it happening less in the Y. Also, I didn’t click the article originally as Fred is a click diva and generally disliked by the Tesla community for his questionable reporting. Electrek is an EV fan blog, not much else.
WashPo reports a huge spike of federal complaints from Tesla owners starting in Oct 2021, well into the Vision-only Tesla technology
These are some pretty respectable sources. Federal complaints are public.
> “We primarily drove the car on two-lane highways, which is where the issues would show themselves consistently,” he said in an email. “Although my 2017 Model X has phantom braked before, it is very rare, the vision-based system released May 2021 is night and day. We were seeing this behavior every day.”
So we have Electrek, Washington Post, and the official NHTSA Federal registry in agreement over these phantom braking events spiking in October / November timeframe of 2021. I don't think this is an issue you can brush off with anecdotal evidence or anti-website kind of logic.
That’s totally fair. I’m not pretending it isn’t a problem. Phantom braking is scary as hell when you’re on the highway. I misread your comment on the date and think that’s the thing you really focused on, when I didn’t. You’re right. This is a serious problem.