Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

According to news in the morning of March 21, Beijing time, Tesla CEO Elon Musk (Elon Musk) announced nearly two years ago that Tesla would stop installing radar sensors on cars. Data show that the number of accidents occurred and close to Tesla's car has increased since then.

Interviews with dozens of Tesla's former employees, test drivers and other experts show that after the upgrade in 2021, Tesla cars driving through the Autopilot or FSD function are more likely to brake because of non-existent obstacles, misidentify street signs and find it difficult to identify emergency vehicles.

Some sources said that more and more cases of false braking were related to Tesla's decision to cancel the radar sensor on the vehicle. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which is investigating the problem, has received hundreds of complaints about the wrong brakes in the past nine months, according to the agency. Last year, more than 750 Tesla owners complained that their cars suddenly braked inexplicably while driving.

At the same time, after more than a dozen accidents in which Tesla's car crashed into an emergency rescue vehicle, NHTSA also stepped up its investigation into Tesla's Autopilot function in 2022. NHTSA said that this driving assistance function has difficulties in identifying parked vehicles.

Musk initially announced that Tesla would stop installing radar sensors in cars from 2021. It was reported that some engineers were "taken aback" by the statement and contacted a former Tesla executive in the hope of persuading Mr Musk to change his decision. Musk has also said in the past that he hopes Tesla's FSD and Autopilot software can simulate the senses of human drivers through cameras rather than radar.

At present, all Tesla cars are equipped with Autopilot driving assistance function. Users can also pay $15000 in a lump sum or $199per month to enable the FSD feature. FSD helps cars identify stop signs and traffic lights, adjust lanes automatically and park automatically. However, Tesla said that neither Autopilot nor FSD can replace drivers with licenses.

Before 2021, Tesla cars also used radar sensors to identify obstacles in addition to cameras. Currently, Tesla relies on eight cameras and Autopilot image tagging personnel to train cars to respond to the environment. Tesla's employees also mark videos captured by car cameras and train software to identify and deal with different obstacles.

Other autopilot sensors, such as lidar, are also used by Tesla's competitors. These vehicles use lidar to map the digital environment to avoid errors, even if the cameras are obscured by external obstacles such as rain, snow and fog. However, Musk has previously said that the cost of lidar is too high, so it is "doomed to failure".

Since 2016, Musk has promised that Tesla will soon launch a real self-driving car, but experts are not optimistic.

Earlier this year, several experts said that Tesla FSD is still a long way from autopilot. In February this year, Tesla released an OTA software upgrade to 362000 vehicles to solve a problem with FSD. NHTSA said at the time that the problem could lead to "unsafe behavior at crossroads".

A spokesman for Tesla did not comment. In the voluntary vehicle safety report, Tesla said that of all the vehicles tested by the US government's New car Assessment Program, Tesla's car had the lowest overall probability of injury.

In January this year, Tesla also said that in the third quarter of 2022, the probability of Tesla's accident was as low as one accident per 6.26 million miles (10.074 million kilometers).

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