Hypothetically, Tesla would spin this story differently in no time if they are making great strides in a cheap solid-state radar.
For now, though, it looks like Tesla is building a case after they decided to do away with radar. I recall EM saying that it looks ugly and expensive too. I really got confused when Telsa came up with this patent though https://twitter.com/iamkellex/status/1534240730633236480?s=2...
No one sensor will work for all use cases; each has pros and cons. Radar really shines with depth sensing; it can cut through rain, fog, and snow like a hot knife through butter, much better than pure vision-based systems. At the same time, it seems to fail during harsh breaking and maybe a few other scenarios.
The ability to cut through rain, fog, and snow is precisely why so many companies use radar based systems - that's arguably when they are the most important and useful.
Leaning further into their vision systems when their vision systems cause their cars to slam into emergency vehicles that aren't even in travel lanes, and to rear-end tractor trailers, isn't encouraging. Musk is placing the rest of us at risk and I'm sick of it.
I get phantom forward collision warnings on my car quite often, a 2015 VW Jetta TDI SEL. There are a few places where it triggers ~1/3 of the time while driving on a clean road with no other cars around in either direction.
The system doesn't trigger breaking just a warning alarm beep and dash screen warning message, but all these systems are unreliable at this point, even the newer ones have these same false positives and false negatives.
It does make sense to err a bit on the side of caution for warnings. With warnings, a false positive is better than a false negative. It’s better to occasionally annoy the driver (within reason) than fail to warn for an accident.
This isn’t the case with braking. You want to have a high degree of confidence in that scenario because you don’t want to cause an accident. It’s better to react later to an impending collision than it is to cause an accident that would have never happened.
For now, though, it looks like Tesla is building a case after they decided to do away with radar. I recall EM saying that it looks ugly and expensive too. I really got confused when Telsa came up with this patent though https://twitter.com/iamkellex/status/1534240730633236480?s=2...
No one sensor will work for all use cases; each has pros and cons. Radar really shines with depth sensing; it can cut through rain, fog, and snow like a hot knife through butter, much better than pure vision-based systems. At the same time, it seems to fail during harsh breaking and maybe a few other scenarios.