Because its vehicles have trouble spotting small animals in the dark — a challenge highlighting long-standing criticisms of the company’s camera-only autonomous driving system, elon Musk has acknowledged that Tesla’s Robotaxi service is struggling to operate late into the night.
Addressing why the service has been slow to expand after dark, Tesla CEO pointed to low-light, low-contrast detection as the key obstacle, specifically citing the difficulty of identifying “grey kittens on grey tarmac.”
By contrast, active sensors like lidar and radar do not rely on ambient lighting. Lidar projects its own laser pulses to generate precise, real-time 3D depth maps, detecting any object that protrudes above the road surface regardless of colour or darkness. Radar emits radio waves to track distance and velocity, cutting through fog, dust, and glare that routinely blind camera lenses.
How Google’s Waymo has solved ‘kitten problem’
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is actively investigating 3.2 million Tesla vehicles over FSD collisions in low-visibility environments.
As part of that inquiry, federal investigators requested internal company communications, including a document titled “Radar Saves Us”, recalling Musk’s private admission in 2021 that vision paired with high-resolution radar would outperform vision alone. Incidentally, safety regulators are scrutinising the company’s approach.