for some time now. There's also been plenty of talk about an unassisted coast-to-coast Tesla trip, a fleet of robotaxis, and the like. However, the technology has been much harder to"solve" than Tesla expected.
Tesla has been saying for years now that every car it produces has all the hardware necessary to be able to accomplish the above. After sharing such goals, the company also removed the radar from its vehicles in favor of a camera-based vision-only setup, which has proven quite successful. More recently, it came to light that, and we know full well that Musk is very opposed to the use of Lidar.
During the time that Tesla's EVs were supposed to be fully equipped with the hardware to drive themselves, the automaker was forced to do computer and camera upgrades to bring older vehicles up to date. However, despite years of work and many incremental software updates, Tesla's cars still can't completely drive themselves. The company insists that a driver must be present and ready to take control at any time.
Unlike most legacy automakers, Tesla makes changes to its vehicles' hardware on the fly. This means that at any given time, it could begin using new hardware in any of its vehicles. That said, the automaker has noted that if you own a vehicle and new hardware is required, it will perform the upgrade free of charge.
More recently, it has become clear that Tesla will likely have no choice but to make some significant updates and upgrades if it's going to truly achieve a much higher level of vehicle autonomy. According to, Tesla may be adding a radar back into its cars as soon as this month. The publication also notes that the refreshed
Good timing
Hello NHTSAgov! You on this?