For New Tesla Owners, Tesla's US$144 Ultrasonic Sensor Creates a Parking Functionality Gap

Customers of Tesla cars are frequently shocked to learn that the EV manufacturer has deleted the parking sensors from its new vehicle batches without first providing an alternative. While Tesla does caution that the switch to camera-only autonomous driving and parking assistance will take some time, a solution has not yet been found. The final piece of equipment for scanning the environment around its cars that is not a part of its Tesla Vision camera-only self-driving system, the ultrasonic parking sensors, were recently taken out of batches of new cars produced by Tesla. In the past, it had banned LiDAR from being used in its vehicles because it believed that Autopilot and the premium Full Self-Driving Beta feature could only be accomplished with a set of high-resolution cameras. The most lucrative manufacturer in the world saved around $144 per vehicle by getting rid of the ultrasonic sensors, but despite the fact that Park Assist would operate flawlessly if it relied only on cameras, the feature hasn't yet been implemented in the software. Though there are a few items lacking from its Vision-only solution during the changeover phase, Tesla does caution potential owners about them: [caption id="attachment_69724" align="aligncenter" width="1200"] Image: Tesla[/caption] During this changeover, various features will be temporarily limited or deactivated in Tesla Vision vehicles without USS for a brief period of time.

• When the car is moving at less than 5 mph, Park Assist will warn you of nearby objects.
• Autopark: a maneuver that automatically enters parallel or perpendicular parking spaces. Summon: Using the Tesla app, manually maneuver your car forward or backward.
• Utilizing the Tesla app, Smart Summon directs your car to a preset destination or to your current location. These functionalities will soon be reinstated through a succession of over-the-air software updates once they reach performance parity with today's vehicles.

Still, this means that Tesla customers who don't regularly follow the EV manufacturer's whims may be astonished to learn that they would have to rely on their eyes and their common sense when parking after receiving a vehicle from one of the latest batches without parking sensors fitted. Without the ultrasonic sensors, as would be expected, the system is unable to identify objects laying low, such as the snowbank in the test video below, and is unable to issue warnings when backing up to another vehicle, for example, as the owners are currently awaiting a software update for that. With the highly anticipated single-stack FSD v11 update, which should bring Elon Musk's promised true autonomous driving that Tesla can't or won't acquire regulatory certification for anyway, the repair should be available within the next several weeks. No other automaker will be able to match Tesla's advantage of a mapping database that has gathered real-time data from actual drivers for millions of kilometers, thus it may be justified in Tesla's hubris to insist on a camera-only system. However, it can't be good for its declining brand loyalty metrics that the fresh batches of its costly electric vehicles don't have basic parking sensors, and there wasn't a replacement option released before they were removed.