Tesla’s active safety features powered by its new Tesla Vision computer vision system without radar are proving to be at least as good as radar in a new independent test.
When Tesla announced the transition to its “Tesla Vision” Autopilot without radar, it warned that it would result in limitations of some Autopilot features at first.
It didn’t really affect Tesla’s major active safety features powered by Autopilot, but Consumer Reports and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) both pulled their top safety rating picks for Tesla’s Model 3 as they believed the active safety features to be gone.
Today, they have reinstated the ratings after the latter tested them on the new Model 3 and found that the active safety features were at least just as good without radar.
IIHS wrote:
“IIHS has completed tests of the 2021 Tesla Model 3’s new camera-based front crash prevention system, which rates superior for vehicle-to-vehicle interactions and advanced for pedestrian interactions.”
On their website, they are listing a “superior” rating for “front crash prevention vehicle to vehicle, which is basically Automatic Emergency Braking:
The rating is the same as the previous version of the Model 3 with a radar.
For vehicle to pedestrian crash prevention, IIHS is giving “advanced” ratings for both with and without radar:
CEO Elon Musk commented on the result of the tests:
“Top Safety Pick+ from IIHS! That’s the highest overall rating, but we think we can get max score for all subcategories/individual tests too. Retesting in a month or so with improved software. The improved software will then be uploaded to all cars with FSD computers.”
Furthermore, we reported earlier today that Tesla started pushing a new software update for vehicles equipped with Tesla Vision that removed some of the limitations in the original release of the new computer vision system.
When first releasing the Tesla Vision update, Musk told Electrek that “probability of safety will be higher with pure vision than vision with radar, not lower as vision has become so good that radar actually reduces signal noise.“
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