Note this is all speculation on my part, no hard evidence of this yet: I have a theory that I am toying with about the very large blind spot in front of the bumper and a lot of recent happenings with the removal of USS. The complete silence about the USS removal topic when Elon has been prodded by his Twitter followers is a bit telling. I think there is more to this story than Tesla wants to let on right now, perhaps to avoid people rejecting 2022 models in hopes of getting the new 2023 changes with no USS.
In February Elon tweeted "Only very high resolution radar is relevant."
In June Tesla filed with the FCC their HD Radar (application 2AEIM-1541584), in which they requested 180 days of confidentiality on several documents including user manual updates (which tend to be car manuals based on previous FCC applications), internal and external photos of the HD radar, and test set-up photos. This type of confidentiality request isn't that out of the ordinary for things they will be putting into the cars soon. The confidentiality of these expires on December 4th, 2022 and will be released at that time.
Just one month ago the Tesla HD radar leaked into the Model X parts manual and has since been removed. The timing of a brand new part accidentally leaking into the EPC just a month before they start producing the next model year is a bit suspicious on its own.
About a week later Elon tweeted about how "Replacement cameras will be available early next month" for older S/X cars waiting on them. A curious statement unless there was a camera shortage that we didn't know about and he was expecting a shipment. The far more likely reason for this now is he knew they would have extra HW2.5 cameras available for retrofits because they were switching new cars over to new model repeater cameras. This doesn't have anything to do with HD radar itself, but read on.
Then about a week ago with the USS announcement, Elon has been utterly silent on the topic and not responding to the first thing people noticed: The cameras are different, they appear to have a larger lens, higher FOV, and appear very slightly angled in comparison to the previous cameras. See this twitter thread on the topic.
We have known this from just looking at the Dashcam, but Sandy Munro's team showed there is a decent blind spot directly in front of the front bumper from the cameras that Tesla will have no sensor information about when USS is removed.
What if the answer is much simpler than Tesla is letting on and they do not want to talk about the cameras and radar to avoid people rejecting 2022s knowing 2023s have updates to the FSD hardware suite. What if Tesla is introducing the HD radar that Elon said was all that would be relevant less than a year ago? Tesla may not actually be creating a huge blind spot in front of the bumper if, in fact the HD radar is included with the new models but they aren't willing to publicly disclose it yet. They would get sensor information from that radar about objects right in front of the bumper.
As of right now the idea that the car is losing USS in 2023 models is a driver for people to want their 2022 cars. This isn't the first time this happened, last year Tesla was fairly quiet about the AMD MCUs going into 3/Y until customers started noticing it, and that was far more obvious. They are also probably confident enough that no one is going to go digging that deeply into their brand new 2023 car before they do announce this information. In addition they likely want to avoid too much confusion about the whole "Tesla Vision" topic all at once.
The only real way to see the radar area is to remove the front bumper, and I think it would be super interesting if someone who does get a 2023 model does take a look.
In February Elon tweeted "Only very high resolution radar is relevant."
In June Tesla filed with the FCC their HD Radar (application 2AEIM-1541584), in which they requested 180 days of confidentiality on several documents including user manual updates (which tend to be car manuals based on previous FCC applications), internal and external photos of the HD radar, and test set-up photos. This type of confidentiality request isn't that out of the ordinary for things they will be putting into the cars soon. The confidentiality of these expires on December 4th, 2022 and will be released at that time.
Just one month ago the Tesla HD radar leaked into the Model X parts manual and has since been removed. The timing of a brand new part accidentally leaking into the EPC just a month before they start producing the next model year is a bit suspicious on its own.
About a week later Elon tweeted about how "Replacement cameras will be available early next month" for older S/X cars waiting on them. A curious statement unless there was a camera shortage that we didn't know about and he was expecting a shipment. The far more likely reason for this now is he knew they would have extra HW2.5 cameras available for retrofits because they were switching new cars over to new model repeater cameras. This doesn't have anything to do with HD radar itself, but read on.
Then about a week ago with the USS announcement, Elon has been utterly silent on the topic and not responding to the first thing people noticed: The cameras are different, they appear to have a larger lens, higher FOV, and appear very slightly angled in comparison to the previous cameras. See this twitter thread on the topic.
We have known this from just looking at the Dashcam, but Sandy Munro's team showed there is a decent blind spot directly in front of the front bumper from the cameras that Tesla will have no sensor information about when USS is removed.
What if the answer is much simpler than Tesla is letting on and they do not want to talk about the cameras and radar to avoid people rejecting 2022s knowing 2023s have updates to the FSD hardware suite. What if Tesla is introducing the HD radar that Elon said was all that would be relevant less than a year ago? Tesla may not actually be creating a huge blind spot in front of the bumper if, in fact the HD radar is included with the new models but they aren't willing to publicly disclose it yet. They would get sensor information from that radar about objects right in front of the bumper.
As of right now the idea that the car is losing USS in 2023 models is a driver for people to want their 2022 cars. This isn't the first time this happened, last year Tesla was fairly quiet about the AMD MCUs going into 3/Y until customers started noticing it, and that was far more obvious. They are also probably confident enough that no one is going to go digging that deeply into their brand new 2023 car before they do announce this information. In addition they likely want to avoid too much confusion about the whole "Tesla Vision" topic all at once.
The only real way to see the radar area is to remove the front bumper, and I think it would be super interesting if someone who does get a 2023 model does take a look.
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