WHY

Cameras as Eyes!

   Tesla began developing Autopilot more than seven years ago in an effort to meet new safety standards in Europe, which required technology like automatic braking, according to three people familiar with the origins of the project. The company originally called this an “advanced driver assistance” project, but was soon exploring a new name. Executives led by Mr. Musk decided on “Autopilot,” though some Tesla engineers objected to the name as misleading, favoring “Copilot” and other options, these three people said. The name was borrowed from the aviation systems that allow planes to fly themselves in ideal conditions with limited pilot input. 

At Autopilot’s official announcement in October 2014, Tesla said that the system would brake automatically and keep the car in a lane but added that “the driver is still responsible for, and ultimately in control of, the car.”

It said that self-driving cars were “still years away from becoming a reality”. 

At the beginning, Autopilot used cameras, radar and sound-wave sensors. But Mr. Musk told engineers that the system should eventually be able to drive autonomously from door to door — and it should do so solely with cameras, according to three people who worked on the project. They said the Autopilot team continued to develop the system using radar and even planned to expand the number of radar sensors on each car, as well as exploring lidar — “light detection and ranging” devices that measure distances using laser pulses. 

But Mr. Musk insisted that his two-eyes metaphor was the way forward and questioned whether radar was ultimately worth the headache and expense of buying and integrating radar technology from third parties, four people who worked on the Autopilot team said. 

Over time, the company and the team moved closer to his way of thinking, placing more emphasis on camera technology, these people said. 

Other companies developing driver-assistance systems and fully autonomous cars thought cameras were not enough. Google, for example, outfitted its self-driving test cars with expensive lidar devices as big as buckets mounted on the roof. 

Cameras, by contrast, were cheap and small, which made them appealing to Tesla for its sleek cars. Radar, which uses radio waves and has been around for decades, was cheaper than lidar, a less common technology. But according to three people who worked on the project, some engineers backed Mr. Musk’s cameras-only approach, arguing that radar was not always accurate and that it was difficult to reconcile radar data with information from cameras.Autonomous driving experts said Mr. Musk’s cameras-as-eyes analogy was deeply flawed, as did eight former Autopilot engineers interviewed for this article, though some said there were colleagues who supported Mr. Musk’s view. 

By the end of 2015, Mr. Musk was publicly saying that Teslas would drive themselves within about two years. “I think we have all the pieces, and it’s just about refining those pieces, putting them in place, and making sure they work across a huge number of environments — and then we’re done,” he told Fortune magazine. 

Aesthetics also influenced decisions about radar. 

In late 2014, Tesla bean installing radar on its Model S sedans as it prepared to roll out the first version of Auto pilot. But Mr. Musk did not like the way the radar looked inside an open hole in the front of the cars and told his engineers to install a rubber seal, according to two people who worked on the project at the time, even though some employees warned that the seal could trap snow and ice and prevent the system from working properly. 

These people said the company went ahead with Mr. Musk’s instructions without testing the design in winter weather — but resolved the situation after customers complained that the radar stopped working in winter. 

In mid-2015, Mr. Musk met with a group of Tesla engineering managers to discuss their plans for the second version of Autopilot. One manager, an auto industry veteran named Hal Ockerse, told Mr. Musk he wanted to include a computer chip and other hardware that could monitor the physical components of Autopilot and provide backup if parts of the system suddenly stopped working, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting.