Tesla’s new Model 3 and Model Y vehicles with Tesla Vision and no radar are still equipped with Autopilot’s active safety features despite what the media are saying and some organizations dropping their Tesla safety ratings.

Here’s what happened.

Earlier this week, Tesla announced the transition to its “Tesla Vision” Autopilot without radar, and it warned that it would result in limitations of some Autopilot features at first.

Tesla only mentioned limitations for Autosteer and Smart Summon and not any of the important active safety features that are powered by Tesla’s Autopilot, like forward collision warning and automatic emergency braking.

Yet, a questionable report led people to believe that Tesla’s new vehicles without radar don’t have the features, and it even led to some organizations dropping safety ratings on Model 3 and Model Y vehicles.

As we reported yesterday, it originated from Reuters reporting that NHTSA was briefed by Tesla about the change and then updated its website to remove active safety features as standard on Model 3 and Model Y vehicles.

The report alluded that those vehicles were not being equipped with those features anymore despite also stating that the agency said it “only includes check marks for the model production range for the vehicles tested.”

It led us to believe that the safety features might still be there, and NHTSA simply hasn’t tested them yet on the new version of those vehicles, but the damage was already done.

Following the report, Consumer Reports and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) both pulled their top safety rating picks for Tesla’s Model 3 as they believed the active satey features to be gone.

Jake Fisher, director of auto testing at Consumer Reports, said:
It is extremely rare for an automaker to remove safety features from a vehicle during a production run, even temporarily, but this isn’t the first time that Tesla has done this.

Reuters was quick to share Consumer Reports and IIHS’s reactions to their own report about NHTSA’s update, but the problem is that the active safety features are still in Tesla’s new vehicles without radar.

After our suspicions that this whole thing might be a misunderstanding, we contacted Tesla CEO Elon Musk who confirmed that the active safety features are in new cars rolling off the line and NHTSA are going to test them next week.

Musk told Electrek:
Just confirmed with the Autopilot team that these features are active in all cars now, including vision-only. NHTSA automatically removes the check mark for any cars with new hardware until they retest, which is happening next week, but the functionality is actually there.
Some new Tesla owners who have taken deliveries of new Model 3 and Model Y cars without radar yesterday are also confirming that the safety features are active.

Musk added that he believes the safety features will improve with Tesla’s new pure vision solution:
It will have all the safety features of prior vision+radar and then some. The software should be fully rolled out to all new vehicles within two weeks. The probability of safety will be higher with pure vision than vision+radar, not lower. Vision has become so good that radar actually reduces signal/noise.

Tesla is expected to start rolling out its new version of its Tesla Vision software to the fleet in two weeks – leading to the release of its Full Self-Driving v9 beta software.

Electrek’s Take
It looks like this was just a bad game of telephone that resulted in both Consumer Reports and IIHS dropping their safety ratings on Model 3.

Since they did that without testing whether the new version had the safety features, let’s see if they reinstate it without testing either.

It goes to show that you need to be careful how to interpret media reports.

NHTSA never actually said that the new vehicles weren’t equipped with those features, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they explicitly said that to Reuters since they did note that they remove the checkmarks when they haven’t been able to test it.

Yet the publication still made it vague in their original report, and then they were quick to report on Consumer Reports and IIHS pulling their safety ratings based on the assumption that the safety features were gone, which was in turn based on their own reporting.

Let’s all try to do better.

...And by streams, EE Times is talking about cars’ radar sensors interfering with each other, and this can cause minor errors at best and total radar blindness at worst. I think we can all agree that having a car rely on radar, and then having that car go blind on you while you’re going down the highway, would be a bad thing. You probably won’t face total protonic reversal, but you could end up dead just the same.

Radar works by sending out radio waves and then listening for the echo of the radio waves that bounce back off of things. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s useful at seeing where things are and how far away they are. It’s not the only way for a car to know this, as vision-only systems like what Tesla is working on and lidar (light radar) systems most other AV developers rely on provide great alternatives.

The problem is kind of like walking around with a bunch of other people in the dark, and everybody has a flashlight. Except instead of carefully and methodically pointing one flashlight around to where you’re looking, the people in the crowd have a bunch of bright flashlights pointing every which way so everything around them is lit up. This approach to using flashlights might work okay for one person, but the problem is that your flashlights are pointing in other people’s eyes, and making their flashlights worthless because you’re blinding them. Also, their excessive flashlight setup blinds you, too, so everybody is now just as blind as they were with no flashlights at all.

Martin Duncan, general manager of ADAS and ASIC division of ST Microelectronics, told EE Times, “The fact that we have now 25% of new vehicles with radar systems, it is already an issue. If you try to capture in real time road conditions, it is very easy to see transmissions from multiple vehicles. As we are all using the same frequency band this, will potentially worsen as fitment rate increases.”

While the suppliers of automotive radar systems have been concerned about this for years, it’s largely been their problem to work on filtering out all of the interference from other radars. The suppliers, along with government agencies in Europe and the United States have been studying and worrying about the interference issue for years, but the automakers and those developing overall autonomy and driver assistance features haven’t had to deal with the issue so much themselves.

Instead of working on coordinating different radar systems so they don’t blind each other (like when I tell my kids to keep the flashlight pointed away from my face at night), the current industry standard for radar is to just be random and hope it works out. The radars use random frequencies and timing so they don’t hurt each other as badly, but this approach won’t work in the future when most cars on the road are using it.

NXP Semiconductors paints a grim picture, but also has a solution:

“… Systems that operate well in environments with few other radars may suffer significant degradation of performance in radar congested environments. The results of the study show, levels of interference based on operation of current systems in congested environments will be significant. In scenarios with many vehicles operating radars in the 76–81 GHz band, the power from other radars will likely exceed the power of echoes from targets needed for specified performance, by several orders of magnitude.

“… Eventually, to support a high market penetration, some form of agreement between the manufacturers will be needed to more effectively share the sensing resources in a fair way. This last step means that all the players in the market will have to sit together to define a standardized way to access the channel while at the same time maintaining the possibility to have differentiating sensing performance.”

The problem is that most in the industry don’t want to go through all this hassle. They find it easier to keep working on improving their own radar to filter out the interference to avoid being blinded. This approach works today, and will work for a while, but could end up being overwhelmed by congestion on the frequencies if enough radar-equipped cars get on the road.

EE Times says the NHTSA thinks there are two big problems with radar that will be very difficult to solve:

In the case of traffic on a two-lane highway, assuming that the radars use randomly selected carrier frequencies, NHTSA predicted that “an automotive radar would encounter power from other radars far greater than the echoes of its own transmissions needed to track other vehicles. The interference approaches four orders of magnitude, or nearly 40 dB, greater than echoes typical of a reference target, as specified for the system.”

In radars that face rearward (as in blind-spot detection systems), “these units are vulnerable to the direct arrival of forward collision avoidance radars that utilize higher power and antenna gain.” The study said, “Our analysis shows these units could experience interfering power from a forward collision avoidance radar that is nearly five orders of magnitude, or 50 dB, greater than the reflections from their specified reference target.”

If the light gets bright enough, even closing your eyes at the right time won’t help. The signals could just be too strong.

Even lidar isn’t immune to problems like this, but the brief pulses they send make meaningful interference much less likely. Ultimately, vision is going to prove important on autonomous vehicles, even if only used as a backup to lidar and radar sensors, because they will prove to not be immune to interference.