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[uk] UltraSonic Sensors removal/TV replacement performance
- Thread starter randompixel
- Start date
It's alright, I wouldn't say I've noticed any significant improvements since the initial update. I don't see the "Park assist unavailable" message as much now so maybe something has improved behind the scenes. Measurements are still very inaccurate. I use it as an aid but definitely dont trust it as much as I would USS.
rowedav
Member
I use it as a rough guide only - still need to look and be aware of what is around you, which is exactly what you should do with USS too. Some talk about USS as if they're absolutely flawless and you could park with USS with your eyes closed, which clearly isn't the case.
One of the issues with it is that it is inaccurate. Therefore you can't trust it or rely on it. Therefore it might just be worse than not having it at all. I have a 2018 Seat Ateca with parking sensors that have worked flawlessly for the four years and 80000 miles I've owned it. It has even stopped me from hitting things as it auto brakes if it detects that I haven't seen the obstacle. I, too am impressed that there is any level of functionality from the vision-based system, but as it's often completely wrong it renders itself useless. Ask anyone here, if, for an experiment, they would park solely relying on the sensors to avoid an obstacle. I would in the SEAT, but definitely not in the Tesla.
This might have been shared already but it is pretty damning!
Park assist not available, saying stop even if there is planty of space to manouver or in grass or snow being all over the place with no clue what is a obstacle and what it is not.
Chimpy McChimp
Member
Mine beeps and bongs and the lines frantically wiggle around and the distance measurements flick from 30 inches to STOP and back again with very minimal movement
When it does it it stresses me out a bit.
Having today returned from 2 weeks driving (and parking) in the US, I can confirm parking spots are waaaaay bigger and much more easily accessed in the US.
Missing that cardboard box was pretty shocking, although the USS car wasn't perfect at it either.
I guess the logic in defence of that performance is that if you're driving towards an obstacle then you will have seen it yourself, so what's the big deal if a technology that is supposed to assist you... doesn't? This is specious, really, since it calls into question what the point of even having the technology (or technology generally) if it's not to improve your "quality of life" when driving. If electric windows needed you to wind them up for the final couple of inches we wouldn't tolerate it, but shocking parking sensors are excusable (by some).
The other problem that the video highlights is that the viewing angle of the front cameras are actually worse than you would think. This means that even if you did see an obstacle as you drove towards it, e.g. a high kerb or low wall, as soon as it disappears below the bonnet you left just guessing how far away it is.
That Quicksilver paint job is very nice though.
Interesting thread!
Picked new MY LR up yesterday from the delightful Brent Cross collection centre. Cameras calibrated after 20 miles or so, autopilot options all on, upgrade to 2023.12.5 happened as soon as I got home, but there is absolutely no sign of park assist, no squigly orange and red lines around the car at all.
There is no warning that park assist is inactive or degraded and there are no signs of it in car > controls in (I believe there should be an option to turn park assist chimes on/off). All I get when I put it in R is rear view camera with guilde lines, no distance, beeps and nothing at all in D.
So many of you have this so any ideas why my car doesnt? Is there a way of kick-starting it into life, have Tesla disabled it, should I initiate a service call?
Thanks for any help, I come from an EV brand noted for it cars being full of glitches, so disappointed to run into this on day 1!
Picked new MY LR up yesterday from the delightful Brent Cross collection centre. Cameras calibrated after 20 miles or so, autopilot options all on, upgrade to 2023.12.5 happened as soon as I got home, but there is absolutely no sign of park assist, no squigly orange and red lines around the car at all.
There is no warning that park assist is inactive or degraded and there are no signs of it in car > controls in (I believe there should be an option to turn park assist chimes on/off). All I get when I put it in R is rear view camera with guilde lines, no distance, beeps and nothing at all in D.
So many of you have this so any ideas why my car doesnt? Is there a way of kick-starting it into life, have Tesla disabled it, should I initiate a service call?
Thanks for any help, I come from an EV brand noted for it cars being full of glitches, so disappointed to run into this on day 1!
Zilla91
Active Member
So this is your second Tesla?
You can either try a factory reset, which should work, or can start a service call.
Katic1972
Member
I just sometimes despair at this. It’s utterly laughable that Tesla feel the need to fanny about this much with something so basic and fundamental as parking sensors.
I am old enough to have cars without them (just) but most likely my last car to not have them fitted was probably an mx-5 in 1995 (ish). Every car I’ve had since has has uss that worked perfectly. Parking wasn’t an issue. The tech works, it’s stable and aids driving with certainty.
Along comes Tesla with a half baked idea to save money on sensors, looms, paint and fitting. Why do we need this when we’ve got CAMERAS?
You certainly can see the draw and I’m sure the production engineers were given a msssive bonus for saving on costs but the problem that I have is that this diversion now relies on cameras and a vision system that is barely adequate.
The development team charged with making vision work and integrate with the rest of the platform must be pulling their hair out at the idiocy of it all.
Perhaps in one sense it saves conflicting tech integrating and reduces the demand on processing power but in my view what they’ve done is focus resources away from higher order and more cutting edge advancements into fixing a problem that wasn’t actually there.
What’s next? Oh yes no indicator stalks. Why have those? I’m sure they add maybe £10 per unit to production costs. Get them in the bin. Drivers can negotiate a sub menu if they need to pull out or the vision system will know you want to indicate and do it for you! Can’t wait for the thread on that one.
There’s lots of things you can do in life. It doesn’t necessarily mean you should. So, Unless the cameras get some kind of ability to see when obscured or this failing experiment is binned I’ll not be buying another Tesla. In fact were it not for the charging network, and massive drop in value of the car since 2021, I’d probably already be out.
Please stick to the knitting Elon, stop wasting and diverting skilled development resources into fixing *sugar* that doesn’t need fixing. …..Unless of course the fsd goal has reached its limits and you just need to keep the brains busy on something.
Despite this I do love my M3LR. Honest.
I am old enough to have cars without them (just) but most likely my last car to not have them fitted was probably an mx-5 in 1995 (ish). Every car I’ve had since has has uss that worked perfectly. Parking wasn’t an issue. The tech works, it’s stable and aids driving with certainty.
Along comes Tesla with a half baked idea to save money on sensors, looms, paint and fitting. Why do we need this when we’ve got CAMERAS?
You certainly can see the draw and I’m sure the production engineers were given a msssive bonus for saving on costs but the problem that I have is that this diversion now relies on cameras and a vision system that is barely adequate.
The development team charged with making vision work and integrate with the rest of the platform must be pulling their hair out at the idiocy of it all.
Perhaps in one sense it saves conflicting tech integrating and reduces the demand on processing power but in my view what they’ve done is focus resources away from higher order and more cutting edge advancements into fixing a problem that wasn’t actually there.
What’s next? Oh yes no indicator stalks. Why have those? I’m sure they add maybe £10 per unit to production costs. Get them in the bin. Drivers can negotiate a sub menu if they need to pull out or the vision system will know you want to indicate and do it for you! Can’t wait for the thread on that one.
There’s lots of things you can do in life. It doesn’t necessarily mean you should. So, Unless the cameras get some kind of ability to see when obscured or this failing experiment is binned I’ll not be buying another Tesla. In fact were it not for the charging network, and massive drop in value of the car since 2021, I’d probably already be out.
Please stick to the knitting Elon, stop wasting and diverting skilled development resources into fixing *sugar* that doesn’t need fixing. …..Unless of course the fsd goal has reached its limits and you just need to keep the brains busy on something.
Despite this I do love my M3LR. Honest.
Removing USS was not about cost saving. At least, nobody has made a convincing argument that it is, anyway.
I believe the rumour was that removing USS saves Tesla about $100M/year. Sounds a lot, but Tesla hare a revenue of $59 BILLION/year - and that was 2021, business has grown since. That means removing USS saves 0.17% which is the equivalent of someone earning $50k saving ~$85 a year. In exchange they have taken significant flak and criticism and scored a PR own goal - no business would do that for such a comparatively trivial saving.
The reason for TV replacing USS is that USS does not get Tesla where they need to be for self parking. USS can't detect curbs, can't distinguish between different objects (foliage vs walls etc), can't see purely visual indicators like parked lines, and the output from the sensors is not integrated with the car's 3D model of the world. If Tesla want to deliver a 'robo taxi' that can exit a parked location, make a journey and park again, that's nowhere near good enough.
This trope needs to die, it’s tedious.
I believe the rumour was that removing USS saves Tesla about $100M/year. Sounds a lot, but Tesla hare a revenue of $59 BILLION/year - and that was 2021, business has grown since. That means removing USS saves 0.17% which is the equivalent of someone earning $50k saving ~$85 a year. In exchange they have taken significant flak and criticism and scored a PR own goal - no business would do that for such a comparatively trivial saving.
The reason for TV replacing USS is that USS does not get Tesla where they need to be for self parking. USS can't detect curbs, can't distinguish between different objects (foliage vs walls etc), can't see purely visual indicators like parked lines, and the output from the sensors is not integrated with the car's 3D model of the world. If Tesla want to deliver a 'robo taxi' that can exit a parked location, make a journey and park again, that's nowhere near good enough.
This trope needs to die, it’s tedious.
MrBadger
Badger out
And as they can’t seemingly reliably deliver sensor fusion either, they go with one solution when multiple sensor types would be a far more comprehensive solution.
ACarneiro
Active Member
That’s all well and good. But removing a working set of sensors in a system that works before having an alternative that works is so egregiously arrogant that I can barely comprehend.
But you’re right, all these arguments have been put forth many times over. There is nothing we can do other than watch with great interest and wait.
My car has USS and stalks. I’m keeping it.
Thanks for the replies, I’ll try the factory reset (and cancel the service call I’ve initiated if it works). I see both sides of the argument in that why fix something that works on one hand, but why compromise and keep something that isn’t part of a longer term development strategy on the other. I’m no expert but can’t help thinking the system would benefit from a front bumper camera, easier to see what’s there rather than calculate It.
I think we are going to see a park assist improvement only when tesla decide to update Enhanced Autopilot to actually make autopark and smart summon work. They might be working on it otherwise there would be never a robotaxi because those require to park and that will need a real parking capable software. Hope it doesn't take long.
LiamPope
Member
I'm sorry, it's a far more convincing argument than the one you've just put forwards. When you are aggressively cost cutting, anything you can get away with is fair game, and it all adds up in the end. They will have made similar or even smaller savings with things like downgrading the USB ports, removing passenger lumbar and not fitting a rain sensor, and those moves have also annoyed customers and tarnished the brand, albeit not as much as the USS removal.
Yes USS alone would not deliver true unsupervised autonomous parking and departing, but then cameras alone, especially in the current positions, will not provide that either! In fact, as we can currently see, TV does a far worse job than USS! What is needed is a multi-sensory system with the information that can be gathered from cameras + AI, and the precision measurement and operability in all conditions that can come from USS and other sensors which is essential for this task. Other manufacturers realise this and are beginning to slowly, one feature at a time, leave Tesla behind. Tesla may be slowly realising this too with the reintroduction of radar, but it's gonna be hard for them to swallow their pride and U-turn off this dead-end TV path.
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