Tesla is now taking radars out from customer cars during routine service checks

Tesla has issued a bulletin to its service centers which mandates that the technicians remove the radars that some models shipped with at any suitable occasion. These range from routine center to domestic service visits for issues completely unrelated to the radars or the driver-assist software and the technicians cite different reasons for the removal of existing parts from the client's vehicles.

Some say that the radars still consume some power, others admit that there may be water ingress issues with the sensors, yet all advised that the radar is not needed now that Tesla uses its camera-only Vision hardware for autonomous driving purposes. Recently, Tesla also removed the ultrasonic parking sensors from its new vehicles in order to save about US$144 a pop, but it hasn't gone as far as scraping them off the bumpers during service visits from existing vehicles, for instance.

Owners of new Tesla models without parking sensors were, however, forced to wait for months on a camera-only solution which proved inferior to the dedicated sensors in some situations. That might be one of the reasons that Tesla is shipping the new Model S with its Hardware 4.0 kit that has radar wiring yet again.

Unfortunately, HW4 can't be installed on HW3 or older vehicles, as was the case with the paid HW2 to HW3 upgrades. The different system boards, wiring, and components, makes a HW4 retrofit very hard to pull off as per Munro, too. In any case, Tesla is warning that the old radars would be disabled by software anyway, though that leaves their physical removal somewhat of a conundrum still.

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