[uk] UltraSonic Sensors removal/TV replacement performance

[Artiste]

0

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.

Do we not already have robo taxis? I’m sure I remember the Musk saying there would be one million on the roads by the end of 2020. But then he’s promised a lot of things over the years and completely failed to deliver.

This trope won’t die until Tesla deliver a rock solid, dependable parking assist method. If you find it tedious you don’t need to read it, much less comment on it.

 

[Durzel]

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.

Counterpoint: Look at what Elon is doing with Twitter, selling blue ticks for $8/month, chickenfeed compared to the debt interest obligations.

Even if everything you said there was correct, it doesn't explain why this stuff was removed 6 months before a minimum viable product was delivered to customers. They could've done (and could still do) all of the data crunching necessary to deliver on their aspirational goals without crippling existing, proven functionality that people depend on. The right thing to do would have been to carry on fitting USS to cars, and doing the work they had done over the past 6 months to deliver Tesla Vision Park Assist, and then remove them once it's in a fit state to release (although I'd argue its premature as it isn't close to parity).

"Move fast and break things" is all well and good as a concept, not so great when you're expecting customers to pay full price and suffer degraded experiences.

Also the desperation Tesla shows at the end of quarter pushes doesn't square with the laid back image of them you're painting of them there. I'd suggest the opposite, that Tesla/Musk is desperate to find savings everywhere, to the point where it seems almost ridiculous to the outside observer. Passenger lumbar? Centre console USB data? Both gone, to save pennies. Neither can be explained away by "trust the vision bro".

So yeah, I believe Tesla got rid of USS because - per the rumour - their supply contract finished and they didn't want to renew it, because their end game was to use cameras, only their end game was nowhere near close to being a reality. Tesla pocketed the ~$110 per car, customers paid the same price, and those with USS-less cars who bought EAP/FSD still to this day have none of the features advertised.

 

[Parrog]

Factory reset did the trick, now showing the “degraded“ message also with “calibration in progress” popping up, but the squiggl lines and beeping are there, not used to factory resets changing anything for the better . It did a minor update to 2023.12.9 first, but that wasn’t what fixed the park assist. Thanks again, happy Tesla new boy again.

 

[Jason71]

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.

Perhaps it was the mad rush to remove them 6 months before even having a viable alternative ( some would say we still don't) that lead people to think cost must be a factor? doesn't make sense doing that unless you are trying to save money. Otherwise why not leave in place until you have a working alternative?

 

[Mullermn]

Perhaps it was the mad rush to remove them 6 months before even having a viable alternative ( some would say we still don't) that lead people to think cost must be a factor? doesn't make sense doing that unless you are trying to save money. Otherwise why not leave in place until you have a working alternative?

At a guess it was Covid related sensor shortages that affected most manufacturers. Most manufacturers either delayed delivery or set up retrofit programmes once the sensors were available again, but Tesla opted to go all-in on the Vision direction they would eventually be going in anyway. Tesla have previous form for committing to a direction before it's 100% ready.

 

[Mullermn]

0

Do we not already have robo taxis? I’m sure I remember the Musk saying there would be one million on the roads by the end of 2020. But then he’s promised a lot of things over the years and completely failed to deliver.

This trope won’t die until Tesla deliver a rock solid, dependable parking assist method. If you find it tedious you don’t need to read it, much less comment on it.

Yes, yes, along with virtually everyone else in the world of self driving cars Musk made predictions that proved wildly optimistic. One summary (among many). How does that in any way add weight to the theory that removal of USS was motivated by cost saving?

 

[Mullermn]

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.

A lot of this data fusion discussion was in the context of the low definition radar that Tesla removed, and I think that needs to be kept in mind. Fusing sensor data shouldn't be that hard in principle, but if one of your sensors is a pretty blunt instrument (eg, with no vertical resolution) I can see the argument that finding a way to blend it in might not be worth it. Given that they are now supposedly reintroducing HD radar their posture on this must be flexible.

It could be that if they had the option of high resolution LIDAR data then they'd never have made comments about how merging it together wasn't useful, but Tesla don't have LIDAR - and I think this probably IS for cost reasons. Last estimate I saw was that Waymo's LIDAR kit cost $10k/vehicle, and clearly Tesla can't justify adding that cost to every single car they make. Plus it makes the car look ugly - not a problem for a taxi, but a relevant factor if you have to persuade people to buy one.

 

[Mullermn]

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.

Have there been ANY posts on this forum from people asking if they should cancel their order because the USB ports got downgraded? Are there ANY youtube videos of people ridiculing the company for a lack of lumbar support for passengers? Sorry, I don't think these are comparable.

You could probably make a proportionate level of personal saving if you stopped buying deoderant and shower gel. Are you going to do it, or would you say that's not a worthwhile tradeoff?

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!

Tesla say it will. It clearly doesn't at the moment, but if you're saying it CAN'T work rather than it DOES NOT CURRENTLY work you're going to have to explain your reasoning. You are able to drive (and park) a car despite only being able to look in one direction at a time and with even more blindspots. Why can't a computer?

In fact, as we can currently see, TV does a far worse job than USS!

At the moment, in most respects yeah. But if you're keeping score then you have to note that it can already identify curbs, which the sainted USS, even after YEARS of refinements in the technology, could not. If you want a car to park itself (in the general case, not just in specific parking bays, etc) , not hitting curbs is quite important.

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.

You keep saying this with considerable confidence. Presumably you are old enough to have owned cars without USS on them, and presumably you were able to park them, so I ask again why you're so confident that a computer can't do the same.

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.

This is just lunacy. Other manufacturers are no use at all for a view of where cars are going. Tesla may have a fault of being hugely ambitious and dragging customers along with them (whether they want to go or not) but the other manufacturers would quite happily crank out the same vehicles with incremental tweaks until the end of time.

The only race where the established manufacturers are winning is in the nosedive towards bankruptcy, because they can't respond to the manufacturing process improvements Tesla have made and so (even after the recent price cuts) can't get anywhere near Tesla's profit margin. If Tesla could snap their fingers and bring new production capacity in to existence overnight they have the headroom to cut so much off the price of new cars that the other manufacturers would have to sell them below cost price to remain competitive.

 

[Zilla91]

If you want a car to park itself (in the general case, not just in specific parking bays, etc) , not hitting curbs is quite important.

Very good. Now explain to us all how cars with auto park that use both USS and cameras are able to do just that. Heck, even my USS equipped Teslas can do that today.

 

[Mullermn]

Counterpoint: Look at what Elon is doing with Twitter, selling blue ticks for $8/month, chickenfeed compared to the debt interest obligations.

Isn't Twitter massively in debt and running at a terminal loss? And it's a company that produces nothing of value, there is no product. Slightly different circumstances. However, just for the record, nothing I say is intended as an endorsement of Musk's grasp on reality. Tesla is more than just Musk, even if he is a big part of it, which is to say that it's quite possible he's doing ridiculous things at Twitter.

Even if everything you said there was correct, it doesn't explain why this stuff was removed 6 months before a minimum viable product was delivered to customers. They could've done (and could still do) all of the data crunching necessary to deliver on their aspirational goals without crippling existing, proven functionality that people depend on. The right thing to do would have been to carry on fitting USS to cars, and doing the work they had done over the past 6 months to deliver Tesla Vision Park Assist, and then remove them once it's in a fit state to release (although I'd argue its premature as it isn't close to parity).

"Move fast and break things" is all well and good as a concept, not so great when you're expecting customers to pay full price and suffer degraded experiences.

I agree, as a customer (who ordered a car when they had USS and received one when they didn't, for that matter). But Tesla don't behave that way, do they.

Also the desperation Tesla shows at the end of quarter pushes doesn't square with the laid back image of them you're painting of them there.

Doesn't every single car company, if not all manufacturing companies, make big sales pushes for end of quarter/year etc? Isn't it famously a good time to try and buy a car because there tends to be more flexibility in the price?

I'd suggest the opposite, that Tesla/Musk is desperate to find savings everywhere, to the point where it seems almost ridiculous to the outside observer. Passenger lumbar? Centre console USB data? Both gone, to save pennies. Neither can be explained away by "trust the vision bro".

It doesn't have to be the same answer in every situation. Maybe the USB change was to save pennies. Nobody (beyond a small subset of moderately geeky types) would know or care about the data capability of those USB ports. If they'd never been data capable in the first case nobody would have commented. I do not agree that that's the same situation as removal of USS, which every single motorist is familiar with and considers a standard feature these days.

So yeah, I believe Tesla got rid of USS because - per the rumour - their supply contract finished and they didn't want to renew it, because their end game was to use cameras, only their end game was nowhere near close to being a reality. Tesla pocketed the ~$110 per car, customers paid the same price, and those with USS-less cars who bought EAP/FSD still to this day have none of the features advertised.

This is substantially the same as what I am saying. Whether it was Covid shortages or a contract expiring (or both) - they had a plan to move to Vision and then Some Event occurred that triggered them to push forward with it before the software was complete.

 

[Durzel]

Have there been ANY posts on this forum from people asking if they should cancel their order because the USB ports got downgraded? Are there ANY youtube videos of people ridiculing the company for a lack of lumbar support for passengers? Sorry, I don't think these are comparable.

You could probably make a proportionate level of personal saving if you stopped buying deoderant and shower gel. Are you going to do it, or would you say that's not a worthwhile tradeoff?

Not screwing off a whole order because of something doesn't mean you're not unhappy about it.

Plenty of people would have been at the point of no return when they found out, perhaps having already sold their previous car, worse off due to potential refinancing at higher rates, etc.

I would agree that people aren't likely to cancel orders over losing passenger lumbar or USB data, moreover that it's symptomatic of a "death by a thousand cuts" attitude to margin chasing, where customers are always the ones that lose out. None of the things that have been removed and replaced with camera tech/AI (or not at all) have been to the benefit of the customer.

I don't think it's unreasonable to have an expectation of a certain level of quality of life stuff at a certain price point. Tesla is the only company I'm aware of shaving off components and hoping their customers will suck ft up. To their credit - it has mostly worked, people have still bought the cars. That might not endure forever.

I've seen agitated posts from people who are incredulous that they have to unplug the Sentry drive in order to plug in a controller, or whatever. Usually they've been pointed in the direction of a USB hub solution, which is a bandaid solution when Tesla could simply provide the data cable they took away and the data-capable hub - if they wanted. They don't, because it saves them some money.

I think with respect you're giving them far too much latitude for their attitude to removing this stuff, not passing these cost savings on to customers, etc and giving them credit for a future vision of cameras solving every problem - which patently doesn't exist yet, and may never do in current configurations. Auto wipers may never reach parity without reinstituting a rain sensor, for example, but that won't happen because ~vertical integration~ and hubris.

*shrug*

 

[LiamPope]

Tesla say it will. It clearly doesn't at the moment, but if you're saying it CAN'T work rather than it DOES NOT CURRENTLY work you're going to have to explain your reasoning. You are able to drive (and park) a car despite only being able to look in one direction at a time and with even more blindspots. Why can't a computer?


At the moment, in most respects yeah. But if you're keeping score then you have to note that it can already identify curbs, which the sainted USS, even after YEARS of refinements in the technology, could not. If you want a car to park itself (in the general case, not just in specific parking bays, etc) , not hitting curbs is quite important.


You keep saying this with considerable confidence. Presumably you are old enough to have owned cars without USS on them, and presumably you were able to park them, so I ask again why you're so confident that a computer can't do the same.

I have stereoscopic 3D vision that gives me depth measurement, and I can bob my camera mount around to get further instant depth information from parallax. I also have an insanely well optimised NN AI that makes fantastic use of all that camera input plus extensive training data to make a damn good persistent model of my surroundings. Even with all that I still can't accurately measure the distance to surrounding objects as well as USS can, particularly in poor lighting conditions and where the car itself obscures my cameras. Hence the usefulness of USS.

TV doesn't even come close to my own vision capabilities, never mind to myself augmented with USS. So yes I do indeed say not only does TV currently not perform well enough to park a car, or depart/navigate from very close proximity to other objects, but also that it most likely can't with the current hardware. Let's see what the next few years brings!

This is just lunacy. Other manufacturers are no use at all for a view of where cars are going. Tesla may have a fault of being hugely ambitious and dragging customers along with them (whether they want to go or not) but the other manufacturers would quite happily crank out the same vehicles with incremental tweaks until the end of time.

The only race where the established manufacturers are winning is in the nosedive towards bankruptcy, because they can't respond to the manufacturing process improvements Tesla have made and so (even after the recent price cuts) can't get anywhere near Tesla's profit margin. If Tesla could snap their fingers and bring new production capacity in to existence overnight they have the headroom to cut so much off the price of new cars that the other manufacturers would have to sell them below cost price to remain competitive.

I think what the car industry (i.e. other manufacturers) is doing is actually a pretty damn good view of where cars are going!! And they are all sticking with multi-sensor systems and, as I said, are slowly feature by feature leaving Tesla behind - working auto park, working summon, L3 driving features, etc. The only time what other manufacturers are doing is not a good indication of the future is of course when some major paradigm shifting disruption is afoot. Elon/Tesla absolutely has been this genius disruptor in many areas of the industry - the whole EV powertrain, packaging, manufacturing, etc. But in terms of autonomous driving aids I think it is already being shown vision-only is sadly a dead end. It initially looked to have some promise, but legacy auto has it right this time, and as all the various sensors get better and cheaper, the knowledge to merge them into a cohesive system matures, and more and more cars get features that work better than Tesla's, that will only be more apparent.

You correctly point out benefits and capabilities of cameras, but are failing to put forwards an argument for cameras-only! Except for cost saving, which you claim has nothing to do with it! I'm not arguing USS or cameras, I'm arguing for USS and cameras. Give me one good reason for cameras-only that isn't cost saving. And no you can't have 'but sensor fusion is difficult' because everyone else is starting to show it can be done.

 

[Mrklaw]

if tesla produce a cheaper car, have they painted themselves into a corner with reliance on tesla vision? Either they hope that audience buys FSD (arguably less likely at the lower end) or they're forced to put in expensive computer units to handle basics like parking sensors and wiper triggers

 

[Mullermn]

You correctly point out benefits and capabilities of cameras, but are failing to put forwards an argument for cameras-only! Except for cost saving, which you claim has nothing to do with it! I'm not arguing USS or cameras, I'm arguing for USS and cameras. Give me one good reason for cameras-only that isn't cost saving. And no you can't have 'but sensor fusion is difficult' because everyone else is starting to show it can be done.

Tesla (not me, Tesla)'s position is that the Vision system, which is entirely necessary for their self driving functionality, is capable of mapping the world around the car to the point that the USS data is redundant. The USS data is irrelevant because the car already knows where it is vs. what's around it. Whether they're going to be shown to be correct is anyone's guess, I don't have the insider perspective required to comment. Musk did reiterate that it's going to be better than USS on Twitter the other day when he could have declined to dig any deeper if he knew it wouldn't (not that he has a track record of making smart choices in his tweeting habits). As for why vision only now when it's clearly not as capable as USS, that's just how Tesla do things, isn't it? Full commitment to the direction, worry about delivering on it later.

The point I am making is that 'Tesla removed USS to save money' is a really inane oversimplification. Tesla have removed USS and in the course of doing so saved a really trivial (in context) amount of money. You might as well say that Tesla have removed the spare wheel from their cars to save money. Clearly they haven't; they removed the wheel because it takes space that is needed for batteries and contributes significant weight which (on top of the reduced size battery pack and heavy duty jack required to use a spare wheel) further compromises range. The fact that they save some money is a side effect.

 

[MCMY]

Factory reset did the trick, now showing the “degraded“ message also with “calibration in progress” popping up, but the squiggl lines and beeping are there, not used to factory resets changing anything for the better . It did a minor update to 2023.12.9 first, but that wasn’t what fixed the park assist. Thanks again, happy Tesla new boy again.

Thanks for the tip, I had to do exactly the same and it worked.

 

[yessuz]

At a guess it was Covid related sensor shortages that affected most manufacturers. Most manufacturers either delayed delivery or set up retrofit programmes once the sensors were available again, but Tesla opted to go all-in on the Vision direction they would eventually be going in anyway. Tesla have previous form for committing to a direction before it's 100% ready.

covid related shortages affected manufacturers with USS in 2022? - you mean the dumb sensor production? ok... Let's say it is true... However wiring could be in place even without sensor and it could be retrofitted.

when it WAS THE CASE with USB ports for M3 in end 2021 (!) - Tesla just sold cars without USB ports in the center console, but with the holes for them and retrofitted them via ranger appointments few weeks after the car delivery. this most definitely could be done.


interesting that only some very entry models from Citroen lost parking sensors in 2022, and no other manufacturer suffered from it... they were suffering from shortages of other components...
not to mention that the Citroen is like 1/3 price of My/M3

 

[yessuz]

Have there been ANY posts on this forum from people asking if they should cancel their order because the USB ports got downgraded? Are there ANY youtube videos of people ridiculing the company for a lack of lumbar support for passengers? Sorry, I don't think these are comparable.

Because tesla retrofitted them AFTER delivery?! Maybe? Just maybe?

 

[yessuz]

Tesla (not me, Tesla)'s position is that the Vision system, which is entirely necessary for their self driving functionality, is capable of mapping the world around the car to the point that the USS data is redundant. The USS data is irrelevant because the car already knows where it is vs. what's around it. Whether they're going to be shown to be correct is anyone's guess, I don't have the insider perspective required to comment. Musk did reiterate that it's going to be better than USS on Twitter the other day when he could have declined to dig any deeper if he knew it wouldn't (not that he has a track record of making smart choices in his tweeting habits). As for why vision only now when it's clearly not as capable as USS, that's just how Tesla do things, isn't it? Full commitment to the direction, worry about delivering on it later.

The point I am making is that 'Tesla removed USS to save money' is a really inane oversimplification. Tesla have removed USS and in the course of doing so saved a really trivial (in context) amount of money. You might as well say that Tesla have removed the spare wheel from their cars to save money. Clearly they haven't; they removed the wheel because it takes space that is needed for batteries and contributes significant weight which (on top of the reduced size battery pack and heavy duty jack required to use a spare wheel) further compromises range. The fact that they save some money is a side effect.

except it doesn't.

Musk says loads of bullshit on twitter. musk also said, (on twitter) about robotaxis, fsd etc. maybe, just because, if he said otherwise, tesla shares would dive below it was dec 2022?

 

[Hurricane]

Yes, yes, along with virtually everyone else in the world of self driving cars Musk made predictions that proved wildly optimistic. One summary (among many). How does that in any way add weight to the theory that removal of USS was motivated by cost saving?

The difference is the CEOs of other companies don’t continually mouth off making ridiculously inaccurate predictions. The Musk never learns. He needs to either zip it up or start talking out of his mouth rather than his arse.

 

[Drew57]

@Mullermn -

• Positive marketing creates positive emotions.
• Zero marketing relies on customer experience.
• Negative experience creates negative emotions.
• Negative emotions also influence others.

Tesla will reap what they sow.