Is Tesla Warming To Radar Once Again?

Tesla, Inc. TSLA, which has shunned radar and instead pledged allegiance to camera vision, is seemingly rethinking its strategy.

Tesla has registered a new high-resolution radar unit with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission earlier this week, and documents filed with the commission showed, as first noted by the Twitter handle @iamkellex.

The registration would allow Tesla to sell vehicles with new radar units. Although the company hasn't specified the use of the units, reports suggest it could be part of the new Hardware version 4.0.

Another Tesla influencer going by the Twitter handle @greentheonly commented that the frequency appears to be in line with exterior radars from Bosch and Continental. He surmised that it could be Tesla's much-awaited imaging radar.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a tweet in February that only very high-resolution radar is relevant.

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The EV maker removed all radars from the Model Y and Model 3 vehicles sold in North America in May 2021 and followed it up with the removal of the same from the Model X and S vehicles in February.

This is in line with the company's ideology of transitioning to Tesla Vision, its camera-based Autopilot system. For delivering Autopilot, full-self driving and certain active safety features, the company relies on camera vision and neural net processing.

This is in contrast to most other players in the industry, which use lidar for self-driving technology.

Price Action: Tesla closed Tuesday's session 0.22% higher at $716.66, according to Benzinga Pro data.