A former head of Tesla Autopilot says Tesla's camera-only approach to self-driving ignores physics. "Radar is so cheap that dropping it doesn't make sense — dropping it is a weird religious stance that ignores physics," GM Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson told The Verge in an interview published Oct. 27, 2026. Electrek highlighted the remarks on Oct. 29.
What he said
- On vision-only: "If you scale back to vision-only, physics suggests you'll be in trouble in certain situations," Anderson said when asked whether GM could go camera-only like Tesla.
- On radar and lidar: "Cameras can't see through dense fog or measure instantaneous velocity like radar can," he said, adding that lidar "helps co-train camera systems to get better faster."
- On marketing: he said he avoids the term "eyes off" because people use it for "nonsensical levels of automation."
Who he is
Anderson led the Model X program and then Tesla Autopilot in 2015 and 2016 before co-founding Aurora; GM hired him as chief product officer in 2025, Electrek noted. GM plans to launch an eyes-off system with lidar, radar and cameras on the Cadillac Escalade IQ in 2028.
The Tesla side
Tesla began removing radar from Model 3 and Model Y in May 2021 and ultrasonic sensors in 2022. Electrek pointed to NHTSA's ongoing engineering analysis of FSD in low-visibility conditions covering about 3.2 million vehicles. Tesla argues cameras plus fleet data are enough, and its camera-only Cybercabs now run in Texas (Musk on the Waymo race).
