I'm new to this as well, and don't know for sure. But I have to wonder why park assist (and other features) has been missing for almost 5 months so far? Removing USS without an alternative ready to deploy seems a little unfair to customers, especially for 5 months. Maybe there will be an announcement tomorrow at Investor Day, but I'm not holding my breath. In that they're talking about more cameras and HD radar with HW4 eventually, which would be on all models, there's no doubt there will be better performance/more potential - we just don't have any idea exactly how.
Tesla blind spot is not as good as most competitors, rear cross traffic alerts have never been included with AP as far as I know, and parking sensors have not been available in HW3 since USS was removed - that remains to be seen, but 5 months for something that should have been a seamless transition???
Blind spot on other cars i have had, has been 6 USS on the front bumper and 6 on the rear.
The normal 4 and then one in each side that points to the side, to detect cars next to your car.
My last car only had 4 USS front and rear, but instead it had a radar in each of the back corners, so it was actually able to see cars in the blind spot a lot sooner than the USS ones.
Tesla has neither USS, nor Radar (My previous car had 3 radars, the current MY has 0) so has to rely on camera's, which might be good enough, but is probably a LOT harder to get working good, and while USS and radar are pretty tolerant to rain and dirt, the camera is NOT.
Rear cross traffic on my previous car, again relied on the radar in each rear corner of the car, maybe they can do it with the reversing camera, but again...Water, dirt will affect it, and then there is the angle, the radar was able to see a rather large area behind the car, the camera has limited view.
I agree fully, that the sequence should have been
Implement vision based parking, summon and so on and then remove USS....Not the other way around.