An unidentified part has appeared on Tesla's Parts Catalog, and the internet is confused. Twitter user, and popular Tesla hacker, @greentheonly spotted the item on a diagram.
This mysterious item is marked but suspiciously not given a name, a part number or description. However, given his experience with the inner workings of these vehicles, Green believes it is a new Tesla radar. In a follow-up tweet, he doubled down on his stance, saying the part matches the high-resolution radar Tesla registered with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in June.
This latest twist has left hundreds of Reddit users on Tesla's unofficial community scratching their heads. The comment voted up the highest is by iphoneman321, who posted: Radar is dead, long live radar.
A year ago, Tesla announced it was transitioning to Tesla Vision, which is camera-based technology without a radar's assistance or perhaps interference. The support section of Tesla's webpage reads: Beginning with deliveries in May 2021, Model 3 and Model Y vehicles built for the North American market will no longer be equipped with radar. Instead, these will be the first Tesla vehicles to rely on camera vision and neural net processing to deliver Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot, Full-Self Driving and certain active safety features.
Elon Musk clearly prefers the cameras to collect data to maneuver the vehicle, not radar. In April of 2021, he responded to a tweet from @WholeMarsBlog that questioned the removal of radar. It read: Can you tell us more about your thinking behind the pure vision approach? Lots of people arguing no radar is a step backwards. Why did you guys decide it was better not to use it? Musk responded: When radar and vision disagree, which one do you believe? Vision has much more precision, so better to double down on vision than do sensor fusion.
But in an interview with Electrek later that year, he left the door open to bring radar back to Tesla. Electrek quoted Musk saying, "A very high-resolution radar would be better than pure vision, but such a radar does not exist. I mean vision with high-res radar would be better than pure vision."
Musk reiterated that comment in February through Twitter: Only very high resolution radar is relevant.
Tesla's AI Day Part II is on September 30, and Musk has promised "many cool updates." He has also said that Tesla's work on Full Self Driving has been ground-breaking in artificial intelligence. Therefore, it is conceivable that the CEO introduces a new high-res radar to the world during the next AI Day.
