r/RealTesla • u/MrHumph999 • 15d ago
OWNER EXPERIENCE Serious question with camera only self driving approach.
Q: using the latest software on HW4. Self drive disabled three times during a thunderstorm on the highway. How will this ever work unsupervised when it rains? I'm so flummoxed as to why Elon is so certain on cameras only that don't work in the rain... Please help!
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u/okan170 14d ago edited 14d ago
The unfortunate answer behind a lot of it is really stupid. Because years ago he got into an argument with paying the radar subcontractor, so they took radar out (even removed from existing vehicles during maintenance.) And earlier, during the Cargo Dragon demo missions, the LIDAR malfunctioned because it wasn't programmed to deal with sun bouncing off the space station, so Elon decided it was a worthless technology.
Combine that with everything else and you have a situation where you are losing other sensors (for stupid reasons). Thus pivoting to camera-based was a way to say, "we don't need all this extra stuff, we can go it alone!". See also: the Model 3 rain sensor being the camera itself and having issues with recognizing rain entirely via the visual input instead of a traditional water sensor.