Elon Musk is boasting full Level 4 - or even 5 - autonomy for the range of sensors installed on all Tesla cars his company builds, which means the only things holding the cars back from driving on their own are the software and, above all, the legislation.
The CEO of Tesla has also been adamant that cars don't need LIDAR (and advanced radar system that uses laser instead of radio waves) to become self-reliant, arguing that that type of sensor is liable of offering corrupted data when the weather outside is rainy or snowy.
But do you know what other sensors have difficulties seeing through precipitations? Video cameras, and Tesla's Autopilot relies on eight of them to observe the surroundings, together with the front-mounted radar and the ultrasonic sensors.
The two front cameras are covered by the windshield wipers, so rain or snow is not an issue for them, but the other six are more exposed. A few droplets of rain or, even worse, getting covered by snow would make autonomous driving impossible. The system does rely on some level of redundancy, but with six of the eight cameras taken out of the game, would you really be relaxed about allowing the car to operate on its own, even if it said it was OK?
Obviously, Tesla had to find a way to deal with this situation, and it looks like it did so by heating the glass covering the cameras' lenses. It's a simple solution that should work fine provided you don't start off with six inches of snow on your car and a total lack of drive to get it clean before you go.
With winter well installed in parts of the U.S.A., a few owners have already posted videos that prove the cameras are maintained clear. One of them took the more traditional approach of allowing the resistance to melt the snow, but Erik (you might remember him from yesterday's video) went all Predator and used a thermal vision device for a more scientific approach.
His video is a lot more thorough - the other one only focuses on the windshield camera, but that's because it's an Autopilot 1.0 car - but, surprisingly, doesn't really offer a very clear conclusion. It looks like not all eight cameras are heated, with the ones showing the highest temperature being the two frontal ones and those in the front side panels. The rest are still a mystery, but we're sure Tesla will clear the air soon enough.
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