Tesla to remove ultrasonic sensors from vehicles

Tesla will remove ultrasonic sensors from its vehicles starting this month, as it moves ahead with using only cameras in its safety and driver-assistant features.

Tesla vehicles now have 12 ultrasonic sensors on the front and rear bumpers, and short-range sound sensors are mainly used in parking applications and to detect close objects.

Guidehouse Insights analyst Sam Abuelsamid said that those things are pretty cheap. It'll save them some chips. Chief Executive Elon Musk said Tesla can achieve full autonomy with cameras only, but he has missed his targets to roll out self-driving taxis that require no drivers.

After crashes, the Automaker faces growing regulatory, legal and public scrutiny over its Autopilot system.

Tesla will remove ultrasonic sensors from the Model 3 and Model Y globally over the next few months, followed by the Model S and Model X in 2023.

The transition will temporarily limit automated parking features, but it won't affect crash safety ratings, according to Tesla.

Rajkumar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, said it is still to be seen if this will be two steps forward and one step backwards.

While self-driving tech firms and automakers use multiple sensors like expensive lidars, Tesla relies only on cameras and artificial intelligence to help a vehicle recognize the environment.

Professor Philip Koopman of Carnegie Mellon University said the camera's ability to see a car is something that the question is how well the cameras can see nearby the car.

A widely followed Tesla researcher, known as Green on Twitter, said on Tuesday that ultrasonic sensors are also used in Autopilot as a fail-safe feature for changing lanes.

The safety of autopilot is likely to be small. He said that the impact of manual parking on the other hand might be big, and that parking chimes can help people avoid hitting walls and other obstacles.