In Jan­u­ary 2021, Tes­la faced a piv­otal dilem­ma regard­ing its Autopi­lot sys­tem for self-dri­ving cars—whether to con­tin­ue incor­po­rat­ing radar tech­nol­o­gy or shift entire­ly to rely­ing on cam­eras for visu­al data. This deci­sion became emblem­at­ic of CEO Elon Musk’s deci­sion-mak­ing style, which veered between being bold, vision­ary, stub­born, and at times flex­i­ble. Ini­tial­ly, Musk had been semi-recep­tive to using radar; in 2016, he per­mit­ted the instal­la­tion of a for­ward-fac­ing radar to com­ple­ment the vehi­cle’s eight cam­eras for the Tes­la Mod­el S upgrade. This led to the inter­nal devel­op­ment of Tes­la’s own radar sys­tem, dubbed Phoenix.

How­ev­er, by 2021, com­pli­ca­tions emerged. A microchip short­age, spurred by the COVID pan­dem­ic, affect­ed the sup­ply of nec­es­sary com­po­nents for radar tech­nol­o­gy. Addi­tion­al­ly, the Phoenix radar sys­tem was under­per­form­ing. Faced with these chal­lenges, Musk pro­posed a dras­tic solu­tion: elim­i­nate radar entire­ly from Tes­la’s Autopi­lot, favor­ing a pure­ly vision-based approach. He argued that rely­ing sole­ly on cam­eras would be rev­o­lu­tion­ary, dis­miss­ing radar as a redun­dant and inef­fec­tive tech­nol­o­gy.

Despite resis­tance from top exec­u­tives like auto­mo­tive pres­i­dent Jerome Guillen, who high­light­ed safe­ty con­cerns asso­ci­at­ed with remov­ing radar, Musk was unwa­ver­ing. Guil­len’s oppo­si­tion led to a tense con­fronta­tion, end­ing with Musk deci­sive­ly instruct­ing the ter­mi­na­tion of radar use in an email dat­ed Jan­u­ary 22, 2021. Guillen sub­se­quent­ly depart­ed from Tes­la.

The deci­sion to forego radar sparked wide­spread debate and scruti­ny. A com­pre­hen­sive inves­ti­ga­tion by The New York Times revealed inter­nal doubts among Tes­la engi­neers, who were skep­ti­cal of the safe­ty and effi­ca­cy of a cam­era-only Autopi­lot sys­tem. This skep­ti­cism under­scored broad­er ques­tions about the real­ism of Musk’s promis­es regard­ing the Autopi­lot’s capa­bil­i­ties and the safe­ty impli­ca­tions of dis­miss­ing sup­ple­men­tary sens­ing tech­nolo­gies.