Tesla admits to switching off customer cars’ radars without warning

Some Tesla EV drivers in the United States discovered that their Adaptive Cruise Control radar stopped working after visiting a dealership for maintenance. As it now turns out, this is neither a coincidence nor maintenance error: Tesla Inc. explicitly instructs the dealers to physically unplug the radars.

As you may remember, the more recent Tesla EVs come with an active safety package lacking any kind of radars, relying exclusively on video cameras for all machine vision purposes. In contrast, Tesla cars from several years ago still have radars installed – and those had been fully functional, until recently.

The owners have noticed that maintenance workers unplugged the radars from the system. Tesla’s official reasoning for it is that the radars are no longer necessary and deactivating them does not affect the performance of the car and its systems in any way.

However, in reality, there are major differences in the way the older cars perform on the road versus the newer ones. For one, all recent Teslas relying exclusively on video cams are forced to disengage Autopilot after reaching 85 mph (136 km/h). They also have to maintain twice as much distance to the car in front and tend to make more driving mistakes, according to numerous reports. As a result, many owners believe the new camera-only system to be inferior to the radar system.

Tesla has also been deactivating the radars via over-the-air (OTA) updates for a while now. However, those updates had only targeted the more recent cars equipped with capable high-definition cameras. Cars with older, low-res cameras were allowed to keep the radars running.