Tesla CEO Elon Musk overruled engineers who were against removing radars

  • Tesla CEO Elon Musk reportedly overruled the automaker's engineers, who said removing radar would be problematic.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk reportedly overruled the automaker's engineers, who said removing radar would be problematic.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk reportedly overruled the automaker's engineers, who said removing radar would be problematic.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has emphasised on the removal of radars from the Tesla electric cars in favour of cameras. However, his decision was opposed by the Tesla engineers, but they were overruled by Musk, claims a report by The Washington Post. The report claims that a significant number of Tesla engineers were overruled by the EV company’s CEO, Elon Musk when they tried to warn him that removing the radar from the cars would be problematic.

Back in May 2021, Tesla announced that it was eliminating the radars from its new cars in a bid to switch to the so-called Tesla Vision, which only uses cameras to see the road ahead and its own neural networks that are supposed to act like a human brain. However, this decision didn't come easy from the automaker, as the move was opposed by several engineers who claimed this would cause major problems, including the risk of accidents if the cameras were obscured by raindrops or even bright sunlight. However, Musk was adamant about moving to the camera-only strategy for new Tesla cars.

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The report further points out that soon after this move was implemented, there was an uptick in crashes, near misses and other embarrassing mistakes by Tesla cars, which was not before recorded in the vehicles that were equipped with radar sensors. What was even more serious was that despite this, the automaker was disabling the radar sensors in the existing models that were already on the road.

The report also states that Musk's erratic leadership had played a key role in the unpolished release of its much-hyped Autopilot and so-called Full-Self Driving (FSD) features, with engineers forced to work at a rapid pace to develop software and push it to the public before it was even ready. Tesla's Autopilot has been at the centre of accusations in many cases when the Tesla EVs were involved in crashes resulting in even death. In many cases, it was found that Tesla Autopilot was at fault.

First Published Date: 25 Mar 2023, 11:53 AM IST
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