Since humans use their eyes and intellect to navigate three-dimensional space, so should self-driving cars, according to Musk.

Elon Musk reportedly demanded cameras over radar in self-driving cars because human eyes don't rely on radar

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2021-12-06 20:00:05

Since humans use their eyes and intellect to navigate three-dimensional space, so should self-driving cars, according to Musk.

"Humans drive with eyes and biological neural nets," Musk said in October. "So [it] makes sense that cameras and silicon neural nets are [the] only way to achieve generalized solution to self-driving."

Musk has repeatedly instructed the company's Autopilot team, which works on self-driving car tech, to ditch radar and use only cameras instead, the New York Times reported on Monday.

The reason for this approach, Musk said in October, is to focus the data that's being presented to the car's computer systems. Tesla's camera-based "vision" self-driving tech "became so good," Musk said, that adding radar data was actually giving the system more information than it needed and was negatively impacting the software.

Rather than relying solely on cameras, which could be impacted by weather and light conditions, some Tesla engineers argued that its self-driving tech should include radar, LIDAR (a more advanced form of radar), and other sensing tech.