Tesla loses park assist, summon & other features temporarily

The EV maker is said to stop installing the ultrasonic sensors on its Model 3 and Model Y in the coming months.

According to media reports, Tesla has announced that it will be moving away from ultrasonic sensors, mainly used for short-range detection to help with collision warnings and parking. Instead, the company will transition to its camera-only "Tesla Vision" tech in the future.

The EV maker is said to stop installing the ultrasonic sensors on its Model 3 and Model Y in the coming months, while the Model S and Model X will lose out on the sensors sometime in 2023. The functions of the ultrasonic sensors will be taken up by the Tesla Vision tech, which is currently in its Beta phase of testing.

As a result, new Tesla vehicles without ultrasonic sensors will temporarily miss out on features like park assist, Autopark, Summon and Smart Summon. However, once the new tech achieves parity with today's vehicles, the missing autopilot features will be added back via over-the-air updates.

Originally, the autopilot sensors consisted of eight cameras, a front-facing radar and several other ultrasonic sensors all around, required to help achieve full self-driving capabilities. However, the new Tesla Vision tech removes all the ultrasonic sensors and the front radar and uses only the cameras for its autopilot system. Reports state that Tesla believes its vision-based system with artificial neural nets would better replicate human driving without having to pollute the system with radar data.

Source: Electrek