[electric_mayhem]

My guess would be so that eagle-eyed ocd tesla owners don’t freak out over seeming to have fewer cameras in their car than their buddy’s previous model year version.

I’m certain there’s be posts complaining about being short a camera without any understanding of hw4 being better despite having a smaller quantity of cameras.

[xeromal]

I bet this is at least part of the reason if not all.

[Alupis]

It's still incredibly bizarre to go through the effort of manufacturing a real-looking fake camera instead of using an industry-standard feature-delete panel like the entire rest of the automotive industry.

The fake camera feels like it's trying to mislead people.

[xeromal]

It could be but misleading has a few levels. One is misleading that it has a feature that it doesn't (like 100 HP vs 500 HP) and the other is putting something there that a person expects even though it's no longer necessary (like the close door button in an eleveator)

[Alupis]

I think it's clearly misleading in-that it is pretending to have an expensive camera but does not.

No brand-new first-time Tesla owner is going to freak out because there's a feature-delete panel somewhere in the vehicle. There's probably others already after-all, they are very standard in most vehicles.

So... who is this for?

If it looked so terrible to remove one camera, then redesign that component to look good again. After all, it's not like they're going back to the old design.

This would be more akin to your brand new laptop having a fake ethernet port... why?