GM's Sterling Anderson, ex-Tesla Autopilot head: vision-only is "a weird religious stance"
GM product chief Sterling Anderson, who ran Tesla's Autopilot program in 2015–16, called camera-only self-driving "a weird religious stance that ignores physics" — reigniting the radar-vs-vision debate that sits at the core of Tesla's FSD approach.
Per Electrek, the remarks came in an Oct. 27 interview with The Verge. Anderson led Tesla's Autopilot program in 2015–2016, later co-founded Aurora, and joined GM in 2025 as chief product officer; Bloomberg has reported CEO Mary Barra sees him as a possible successor.
He said that going vision-only means "you'll be in trouble in certain situations," arguing cameras can't see through dense fog or measure instantaneous velocity the way radar can. Radar is cheap, he said, so there's no reason to drop it, and training camera systems alongside lidar speeds up their improvement. GM plans an eyes-off system combining lidar, radar and cameras on the Cadillac Escalade IQ starting in 2028.
Tesla began removing radar from Model 3 and Y in May 2021 and dropped ultrasonic sensors in 2022. Musk's stated position is that a very high-resolution radar would beat pure vision, but such a radar doesn't exist. Electrek also noted NHTSA's March 2026 upgrade of its reduced-visibility FSD probe to an engineering analysis covering about 3.2M vehicles. The critic is a competitor's executive, which is worth weighing.
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